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Virginia Tech

CPU/GPU Code Acceleration on Heterogeneous Systems and Code Verification for CFD Applications

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications usually involve intensive computations, which can be accelerated through using open accelerators, especially GPUs due to their common use in the scientific computing community. In addition to code acceleration, it is important to ensure that the code and algorithm are implemented numerically correctly, which is called code verification. This dissertation focuses on accelerating research CFD codes on multi-CPUs/GPUs using MPI and OpenACC, as well as the code verification for turbulence model implementation using the method of manufactured solutions and code-to-code comparisons. First, a variety of performance optimizations both agnostic and specific to applications and platforms are developed in order to 1) improve the heterogeneous CPU/GPU compute utilization; 2) improve the memory bandwidth to the main memory; 3) reduce communication overhead between the CPU host and the GPU accelerator; and 4) reduce the tedious manual tuning work for GPU scheduling. Both finite difference and finite volume CFD codes and multiple platforms with different architectures are utilized to evaluate the performance optimizations used. A maximum speedup of over 70 is achieved on 16 V100 GPUs over 16 Xeon E5-2680v4 CPUs for multi-block test cases. In addition, systematic studies of code verification are performed for a second-order accurate finite volume research CFD code. Cross-term sinusoidal manufactured solutions are applied to verify the Spalart-Allmaras and k-omega SST model implementation, both in 2D and 3D. This dissertation shows that the spatial and temporal schemes are implemented numerically correctly.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Doctor of Philosophy
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Aerospace Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Aerospace and Ocean Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2021

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Xue, Weicheng
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Roy, Christopher J.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Wang, Kevin Guanyuan
  • de Sturler, Eric
  • Srinivasan, Bhuvana

Subjects

dc:subject × 9

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:28749
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/102073

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Xue, Weicheng. CPU/GPU Code Acceleration on Heterogeneous Systems and Code Verification for CFD Applications. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/102073