GPU Parallelization and Optimization of a Combustion Simulation Application.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely used in the area of scientific computing. While GPUs provide much higher peak performance, efficient implementation of real applications on the GPU architectures is still a non-trivial task. It is crucial to realize efficient solution algorithms that can better utilize GPU architectures. This paper presents our efforts in parallelizing and optimizing LESAP, a CFD application for scramjet combustion simulation, on NVIDIA GPUs. The GPU parallelization is realized based on the CUDA programming model, with a data-parallel implicit time-marching method that is efficient on the GPU architecture. Furthermore, shared memory and redundant calculation are proposed to reduce memory access overhead during GPU computation, and data transfer between CPU and GPU is optimized by packing the data to be transferred. The experimental results show that the GPU version, when runs on four V100 GPUs, achieves a speedup of 11.26 times compared to the CPU version that runs on two 24-core Intel Skylake Gold 6240R CPUs. Excellent parallel scalability across multiple GPUs is also observed.