A GPU-Accelerated Sharp Interface Immersed Boundary Solver for Large Scale Flow Simulations

Abstract: Immersed boundary methods (IBMs) facilitate the simulation of flows around stationary, moving, and deforming bodies on Cartesian grids. However, extending these simulations to the large grid sizes required for realistic flow problems remains a significant computational challenge. In this work, we present the implementation and acceleration of \emph{ViCar3D}, a sharp-interface immersed boundary solver, on graphical processing units (GPUs). Using OpenACC, CUDA, and CUDA-aware MPI, we port and optimize \emph{ViCar3D} to multi-GPU architectures. Verification and scalability studies are performed for two benchmark cases: two-dimensional flow past a circular cylinder and direct numerical simulation (DNS) of flow past a finite rectangular wing. For the latter, we observe an approximately 20$\times$ speedup (node-to-node comparison) relative to the CPU-based implementation. The GPU-accelerated solver is capable of simulating complex 3D flows with up to 200 million mesh points on a single node equipped with four GPUs, and strong and weak scaling tests demonstrate maximum scaling efficiencies of 92\% and 93\%, respectively, on multi-GPU systems.