Enhancing Performance of Simulations using GPGPU

General Purpose GPU computing, or GPGPU, is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) to do general purpose scientific and engineering computing. The model for GPU computing is to use a CPU and GPU together in a heterogeneous co-processing computing platform. The sequential part of the application runs on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part is accelerated by the GPU. From the users perspective, the application just runs faster because it is using the highperformance of the GPU to boost performance. We have applied this technique to some sub-problems that form part of an ice-floe simulation problem and conducted an experiment to measure the performance of the GPU with respect to the CPU. The experiment consists of implementing a serial and parallel algorithm to detect and locate the intersection between polygons. We run the serial and parallel algorithms on several different sets of polygons and compare the performance.