GPU Acceleration of Volume Fraction and Centroid Computation from General Shapes on Unstructured Mesh
One important requirement for coupling multi-physics models is a means to remap fields between meshes in an accurate and conservative manner. Since the remapping algorithm is embarrassingly parallel, this motivates the use of Graphical Processing Units (GPU) for such routine. However, since our remapping code, portage, is fairly complex, we explore the use of GPUs through a simpler problem of generating material’s volume fraction and centroid inside each cell of the mesh. We use the same programming structure that is used in portage, namely, on-node parallelism via NVIDIA’s thrust library. Using a similar programming structure enables us to draw lessons from this study that can be applied to the more complex problem. We have found that while the speed-up is pronounced (10-100 times), significant effort is required to re-factor the code so that thrust can be used with a CUDA backend. Moreover, thrust takes away the fine grain control that vanilla CUDA programming gives us.