GPU-Accelerated Computations for Supersonic Flow Modeling on Hybrid Grids

With its strong floating-point operation capability and high memory bandwidth in data parallelism, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has been widely used in general-purpose computing. GPU-based computations have been extensively applied in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This paper aims to design an extremely efficient double-precision GPU-accelerated parallel algorithm for supersonic flow computations on hybrid grids. Compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is used as a general-purpose parallel computing platform and programming model to perform parallel computing codes on GPUs. The cell-centered finite volume method based on unstructured grids is used in the spatial discretization of governing equations, whereas the three-stage explicit Runge-Kutta scheme with second-order accuracy is used for temporal discretization. The turbulence is solved by using the K-ω SST two-equation model. Three test cases are studied to validate the computational accuracy of the proposed algorithm. The numerical results agree well with the experiment data, thereby suggesting that the GPU-accelerated parallel algorithm has good accuracy.