Performance Comparison on Parallel CPU and GPU Algorithms for Unified Gas-Kinetic Scheme

Abstract: Parallel algorithms on CPU and GPU are implemented for the Unified Gas-Kinetic Scheme and their performances are investigated and compared by a two dimensional channel flow case. The parallel CPU algorithm has a one dimensional block partition that parallelizes only the spatial space. Due to the intrinsic feature of the UGKS, a compromised two-level parallelization is adopted for GPU algorithm. A series of meshes with different sizes are tested to reveal the performance evolution of the algorithms with respect to problem size. Then special attentions are paid to UGKS applications where the molecular velocity space range is large. The comparison confirms that GPU has relative elevated accelerations with the latest device having a speedup of 118.38x. Parallel CPU algorithm, on the contrary, might provide better performances when the grid point number in velocity space is large.