English

Fast, feature-rich weakly-compressible SPH on GPU: coding strategies and compiler choices

Computational Physics 2023-05-18 v2 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

GPUSPH was the first implementation of the weakly-compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method to run entirely on GPU using CUDA. Version 5, released in June 2018, features a radical restructuring of the code, offering a more structured implementation of several features and specialized optimization of most heavy-duty computational kernels. While these improvements have led to a measurable performance boost (ranging from 15\% to 30\% depending on the test case and hardware configuration), it has also uncovered some of the limitations of the official CUDA compiler (\texttt{nvcc}) offered by NVIDIA, especially in regard to developer friendliness. This has led to an effort to support alternative compilers, particularly Clang, with surprising performance gains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.11328,
  title  = {Fast, feature-rich weakly-compressible SPH on GPU: coding strategies and compiler choices},
  author = {Giuseppe Bilotta and Vito Zago and Alexis Hérault and Hendrik D. van Ettinger and Robert A. Dalrymple},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.11328},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:09:38.749Z