SPH on GPU with CUDA

Abstract

A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method for free surface flows has been implemented on a graphical processing unit (GPU) using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) developed by Nvidia, resulting in tremendous speed-ups. The entire SPH code, with its three main components: neighbor list construction, force computation, and integration of the equation of motion, is computed on the GPU, fully exploiting its computational power. The simulation speed achieved is one to two orders of magnitude faster than the equivalent CPU code. Example applications are shown for paddle-generated waves in a basin and a dam-break wave impact on a structure. GPU implementation of SPH permits high resolution SPH modeling in hours and days rather than weeks and months on inexpensive and readily available hardware.