Computational Fluid Dynamics and Gpus

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are aimed to reconstruct the reality of fluid motion and behaviour as accurately as possible, to better understand the natural phenomena under specified conditions. Ideally, computational models would need to cover different scales and geometric configurations, and the classic CFD solvers most often require long computational times to satisfy the convergence criteria. With the advent of heterogeneous compute platforms (including Graphics Processing Units GPUs), CFD algorithms can now be implemented to give results in near real-time. The current paper briefly reviews and demonstrates in a general way, two methods able to harness the power of GPUs, to speed up numerical simulations of fluid flows for industrial applications. These include the Highly Simplified Marker and Cell Method (HSMAC), and Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) implemented on GPUs using OpenCL. This paper describes general capabilities for compute and graphics, and method presented could be used to simulate various cases with a specific boundary conditions.