An implementation of the direct-forcing immersed boundary method using GPU power

Abstract

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is utilized to apply the direct-forcing immersed boundary method. The code running on the GPU is generated with the help of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The first and second spatial derivatives of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are discretized by the sixth-order central compact finite-difference schemes. Two flow fields are simulated. The first test case is the simulated flow around a square cylinder, with the results providing good estimations of the wake region mechanics and vortex shedding. The second test case is the simulated flow around a circular cylinder. This case was selected to better understand the effects of sharp corners on the force coefficients. It was observed that the estimation of the force coefficients did not result in any troubles in the case of a circular cylinder. Additionally, the performance values obtained for the calculation time for the solution of the Poisson equation are compared with the values for other CPUs and GPUs from the literature. Consequently, approximately 3× and 20× speedups are achieved in comparison with GPU (using CUSP library) and CPU, respectively. CUSP is an open-source library for sparse linear algebra and graph computations on CUDA.