Programming and Performance of Graphics Processors in Shock Waves Simulation by Finite Volume Method

In this paper, we mainly report on our experience and strategy in programming graphics processing units (GPUs) as fast parallel floating point coprocessors to accelerate the simulation of travelling shock waves of the 2-D Euler equation by the finite volume method. The GPU code is specialized in CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) for which we develop exclusive algorithm in the management of memory access for high efficiency. Through simulations of Rayleigh–Taylor instability problem, its performance has been inspected and is about 119~174 times faster than CPUcode. Beside that, the potential of multi-GPU parallelism is also been investigated for the future of large-scale computing.