Development of a Flow Solver with Complex Kinetics on the Graphic Processing Units

The current paper reports on the implementation of a numerical solver on the Graphic Processing Units (GPU) to model reactive gas mixture with detailed chemical kinetics. The solver incorporates high-order finite volume methods for solving the fluid dynamical equations coupled with stiff source terms. The chemical kinetics are solved implicitly via an operator-splitting method. We explored different approaches in implementing a fast kinetics solver on the GPU. The detail of the implementation is discussed in the paper. The solver is tested with two high-order shock capturing schemes: MP5 (Suresh, et al. (1997)) and ADERWENO (Titarev, et al. (2005)). Considering only the fluid dynamics calculation, the speed-up factors obtained are 30 for the MP5 scheme and 55 for ADERWENO scheme. For the fully-coupled solver, the performance gain depended on the size of the reaction mechanism. Two different examples of chemistry were explored. The first mechanism consisted of 9 species and 38 reactions, resulting in a speed-up factor up to 35. The second, larger mechanism consisted of 36 species and 308 reactions, resulting in a speed-up factor of up to 40.

H. P. Le, J.-L. Cambier · 2011