Improvement of fluid simulation runtime of smoothed particle hydrodynamics by using graphics processing unit (GPU)

This study concerns an implementation of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (sph) fluid simulation on a graphics processing unit (gpu) using the compute unified device architecture’s (cuda) parallel programming. a bookkeeping method for the neighbor search algorithm was incorporated to accelerate calculations. based on sequence code profiling of the sph method,particle interaction computation – which comprises the calculation of the continuity equation and the momentum conservation equation – consumes 95.2% of the calculation time. in this paper,an improvement of the calculation is proposed by calculating the particle interaction part on the gpu and by using a bookkeeping algorithm to restrict the calculation only to contributed particles. three aspects are addressed in this paper: firstly,speed-up of the cuda parallel programming computation as a function of the number of particles used in the simulation; secondly,the influence of double precision and single precision schemes on the computational acceleration; and thirdly,calculation accuracy with respect to the number of particles. scott russell’s wave generator was implemented for a 2d case and a 3d dam-break. the results show that the proposed method was succesfull in accelerating the sph simulation on the gpu. © 2017 published by itb journal publisher.