A GPU based compressible multiphase hydrocode for modelling violent hydrodynamic impact problems

Ma, ZH, Causon, DM, Qian, L, Gu, HB, Mingham, CG and Ferrer, PM (2015) A GPU based compressible multiphase hydrocode for modelling violent hydrodynamic impact problems. Computers & Fluids, 120. ISSN 0045-7930

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Abstract

This paper presents a GPU based compressible multiphase hydrocode for modelling violent hydrodynamic impacts under harsh conditions such as slamming and underwater explosion. An effort is made to extend a one-dimensional five-equation reduced model (Kapila et al., 2001) to compute three-dimensional hydrodynamic impact problems on modern graphics hardware. In order to deal with free-surface problems such as water waves, gravitational terms, which are initially absent from the original model, are now considered and included in the governing equations. A third-order finite volume based MUSCL scheme is applied to discretise the integral form of the governing equations. The numerical flux across a mesh cell face is estimated by means of the HLLC approximate Riemann solver. The serial CPU program is firstly parallelised on multi-core CPUs with the OpenMP programming model and then further accelerated on many-core graphics processing units (GPUs) using the CUDA C programming language. To balance memory usage, computing efficiency and accuracy on multi- and many-core processors, a mixture of single and double precision floating-point operations is implemented. The most important data like conservative flow variables are handled with double-precision dynamic arrays, whilst all the other variables/arrays like fluxes, residual and source terms are treated in single precision. Several benchmark test cases including water-air shock tubes, one-dimensional liquid cavitation tube, dam break, 2D cylindrical underwater explosion near a planar rigid wall, 3D spherical explosion in a rigid cylindrical container and water entry of a 3D rigid flat plate have been calculated using the present approach. The obtained results agree well with experiments, exact solutions and other independent numerical computations. This demonstrates the capability of the present approach to deal with not only violent free-surface impact problems but also hull cavitation associated with underwater explosions. Performance analysis reveals that the running time cost of numerical simulations is dramatically reduced by use of GPUs with much less consumption of electrical energy than on the CPU.