Acceleration of boundary element calculations for closed domain using nonlinear form functions and CUDA technology

Abstract

The evolution of computer technologies, as a hardware and a software parts, allows to attain fast and accurate solutions to many applied problems in scientific areas. Acceleration of calculations is broadly used technic that is basically implemented by multithreading and multicore processors. NVidia CUDA technology or simply CUDA opens a way to efficient acceleration of boundary elements method (BEM), that includes many independent stages. The main goal of the paper is implementation and acceleration of indirect boundary element method using three form functions. Calculation of the potentialdistribution inside a closed boundary under the action of the defined boundary condition is considered. In order to accelerate corresponding calculations, they were parallelized at the graphic accelerator using NVidia CUDA technology. The dependences of acceleration of parallel computations as compared with sequential ones were explored for different numbers of boundary elements and computational nodes. A significant acceleration (up to 52 times) calculation of the potential distribution without loss in accuracy is shown. Acceleration of up to 22 times was achieved in calculation of mutual influence matrix for boundary elements. Using CUDA technology allows to attain significant acceleration without loss in accuracy and convergence. So application of CUDA is a good way to parallelizing BEM. Application of developed approach allows to solve problems in different areas of physics such as acoustics, hydromechanics, electrodynamics, mechanics of solids and many other areas, efficiently.

Keywords

• boundary element method
• parallelization
• distribution of potential
• nvidia cuda
• acceleration