Accelerating a Nonhydrostatic Ocean Numerical Model Using CUDA
Chun Wang · 2013
The computation intensity is considerably high for ocean numerical models,and it is very appropriate to accelerate ocean models by exploiting the computational power of Graphics Processing Units(GPU).The GPU parallelization of a nonhydrostatic ocean numerical model using NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture(CUDA) was described in this paper.The calculation was accelerated remarkably without loss of precision(the relative error was no more than 2×10-3 on a GPU with respect to that on a CPU).The speedup could achieve 232 for single precision computation and 142 for double precision calculation.Unfortunately,most of the ocean numerical models had not been operated to GPU platform up to now and the powerful computing capability of GPU could not be realized at present time.This study accumulated rich experiences on transporting ocean numerical models from CPU to GPU platform,and it showed a good prospect to accelerate the computation of ocean numerical models by using GPU.