Numerical Solutions of Heat and Mass Transfer in Capillary Porous Media Using Programmable Graphics Hardware
Nowadays, a heat and mass transfer simulation plays an important role in various engineering and industrial fields. To analyze physical behaviors of a thermal environment, we have to simulate heat and mass transfer phenomena. However to obtain numerical solutions to heat and mass transfer equations is much time-consuming. In this paper, therefore, one of acceleration techniques developed in the graphics community that exploits a graphics processing unit (GPU) is applied to the numerical solutions of heat and mass transfer equations. Implementation of the simulation on GPU makes GPU computing power available for the most time-consuming part of the simulation and calculation. The nVidia CUDA programming model provides a straightforward means of describing inherently parallel computations. This paper improves the computational performance of solving heat and mass transfer equations numerically running on GPU. We implemented simulation of heat and mass transfer using the novel CUDA platform on nVidia Quadro FX 4800 and compared its performance with an optimized CPU implementation on a high-end Intel Xeon CPU. The experimental results clearly show that GPU can perform heat and mass transfer simulation accurately and significantly accelerate the numerical calculation with the maximum observed speedups 20 times. Therefore, the GPU implementation is a promising approach to acceleration of the heat and mass transfer simulation.
Conclusion
We have presented our numerical approximations to the solution of the heat and mass transfer equation with the second kind of boundary and initial conditions using finite difference method on GPGPUs. Our conclusion shows that finite difference method is well suited for parallel programming. We implemented numerical solutions utilizing highly parallel computations capability of GPGPU on nVidia CUDA. We have demonstrated GPU can perform significantly faster than CPU in the field of numerical solution to heat and mass transfer. Our experimental results indicate that our GPU-based implementation shows a significant performance improvement over CPU-based implementation and the maximum observed speedups are about 10 times.
There are several avenues for future work. We would like to test our algorithm on different GPUs and explore the new performance opportunities offered by newer generations of GPUs. It would also be interesting to explore more tests with large scale data set. Finally, further attempts will be made to explore more complicated problems both in terms of boundary conditions as well as geometry.
Hira Narang, Fan Wu and Miguel Cabral. Numerical Solutions of Heat and Mass Transfer in Capillary Porous Media Using Programmable Graphics Hardware. Recent Advances in Computer Science and Information Engineering Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Volume 126, pp 127-134, 2012. [doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-25766-7_18] [Free PDF]
Category: Articles, Computer Science, Physical Science
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