Seepage Simulation in Porous Media on GPU vs. CPU

Graphics processor units (GPU) which are originally designed for graphics and video games rendering have recently used as massive parallel computing device for general purpose computations.. This paper compares performance of GPUs against CPUs for numerically solving Laplace Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) governing on seepage in porous media. The equations are discretized with finite volume method. Results demonstrate that modern GPUs can be effective computational devices in order to reduce the execution time of numerical methods. CUDA is used as software development kit (SDK) to employ NVIDIA graphic cards for general-purpose tasks and the main program is coded in MATLAB

Keywords:

CUDA , GPU , Seepage , Computational effort , execution time , CFD