# Accelerating moderately stiff chemical kinetics in reactive-flow simulations using GPUs

Source: [Accelerating moderately stiff chemical kinetics in reactive-flow simulations using GPUs](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa2ccd1e209131ce853711>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:53:19.436Z

Authors: Kyle E Niemeyer, Chih-Jen Sung

Published: 2013-09-11T01:29:16.000Z

## Abstract

The chemical kinetics ODEs arising from operator-split reactive-flow simulations were solved on GPUs using explicit integration algorithms. Nonstiff chemical kinetics of a hydrogen oxidation mechanism (9 species and 38 irreversible reactions) were computed using the explicit fifth-order Runge-Kutta-Cash-Karp method, and the GPU-accelerated version performed faster than single- and six-core CPU versions by factors of 126 and 25, respectively, for 524,288 ODEs. Moderately stiff kinetics, represented with mechanisms for hydrogen/carbon-monoxide (13 species and 54 irreversible reactions) and methane (53 species and 634 irreversible reactions) oxidation, were computed using the stabilized explicit second-order Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev (RKC) algorithm. The GPU-based RKC implementation demonstrated an increase in performance of nearly 59 and 10 times, for problem sizes consisting of 262,144 ODEs and larger, than the single- and six-core CPU-based RKC algorithms using the hydrogen/carbon-monoxide mechanism. With the methane mechanism, RKC-GPU performed more than 65 and 11 times faster, for problem sizes consisting of 131,072 ODEs and larger, than the single- and six-core RKC-CPU versions, and up to 57 times faster than the six-core CPU-based implicit VODE algorithm on 65,536 ODEs. In the presence of more severe stiffness, such as ethylene oxidation (111 species and 1566 irreversible reactions), RKC-GPU performed more than 17 times faster than RKC-CPU on six cores for 32,768 ODEs and larger, and at best 4.5 times faster than VODE on six CPU cores for 65,536 ODEs. With a larger time step size, RKC-GPU performed at best 2.5 times slower than six-core VODE for 8192 ODEs and larger. Therefore, the need for developing new strategies for integrating stiff chemistry on GPUs was discussed.

## Recorded benchmark results

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## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2710>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.2710.pdf>)