Heterogeneous acceleration for computational fluid dynamics as applied for off-shore rigs explosions

Fluid Dynamic is a physical phenomenon that is hard to simulate due to the wide range of behaviors that can be found. Accidental Vapor-cloud explosions (VCEs) are interesting due to their complex physical properties and because they can have a very high cost, both in terms of economic impact and lives lost.

Real-time simulations allow for interactivity which again may accelerate the speed of development processes using heterogynous accelerator processors like graphics cards. Although modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are primarily designed to accelerate graphics calculations in computer games, their computational power can now also be harnessed by several other applications. Using the highly optimized system, I demonstrate a large improvement in performance for the complex model, and achieve generally very high performance for the implementation compared to other state-of-the-art computational systems.

Regular consumer GPUs form NVidia can archive an average of millions of particles per second compared to thousands of particles per seconds on the newest Intel processor. My work shows that using the GPU can lead to very large performance improvements that make it possible to do real-time simulations which previously required costly specialized hardware or several minutes, even hours, to successfully perform the tasks.