Механика машин, механизмов и материалов (Mar 2024)
Parallelizing of Computations on a Graphics Processing Unit for Accelerating Boundary Element Calculations in Mechanics
Abstract
In solving problems of computer modeling using various methods, accuracy and computational efficiency questions always arise. This study explores the application of two modifications of the boundary element method to solve the problem of potential distribution within a closed two-dimensional domain with a uniform potential distribution on its boundary. The first modification involves using three nonlinear shape functions instead of one. The second modification applies the Galerkin method to the boundary element approach with three nonlinear shape functions. The essence of this modification lies in the fact that the system of equations is formulated in integral form over the entire boundary element, rather than at collocation points. In addition to this, the paper describes and investigates the advantages and disadvantages of the smoothing modification applied to these approaches. Since the influence matrix consists of independently computable elements, parallelization of calculations using NVIDIA CUDA technology has been proposed to enhance computational efficiency, significantly accelerating the calculation of interaction matrix. The choice of this technology is advantageous due to the prevalence of NVIDIA graphics accelerators in almost every personal computer or laptop, as well as it is easy to use. The study presents an approach to the application of this technology and demonstrates the results, showing the acceleration of parallelized calculations which show the dependence on the number of boundary elements. A comparison of the efficiency of the selected technology when applied to two methods, collocation and Galerkin, is also presented, indicating a significant speedup of up to 22 times by computing the influence matrix of the boundary elements.
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