A highly multithreaded FFT-based direct Poisson solver that makes effective use of the capabilities of the current NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) is presented. Our algorithms carefully manage the multiple layers of the memory hierarchy of the GPUs such that almost all the global memory accesses are coalesced into 128-byte device memory transactions, and all computations are carried out directly on the registers. A new strategy to interleave the FFT computation along each dimension with other computations is used to minimize the total number of accesses to the 3D grid. We illustrate the performance of our algorithms on the NVIDIA Tesla and Fermi architectures for a wide range of grid sizes, up to the largest size that can fit on the device memory ($(512\times 512\times 512)$ on the Tesla C1060/C2050 and $(512\times 256\times 256)$ on the GeForce GTX 280/480). We achieve up to 140 GFLOPS and a bandwidth of 70 GB/s on the Tesla C1060, and up to 375 GFLOPS with a bandwidth of 120GB/s on the GTX 480. The performance of our algorithms is superior to what can be achieved using the CUDA FFT library in combination with well-known parallel algorithms for solving tridiagonal linear systems of equations.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are at the forefront of computational mechanics in requiring large-scale computational resources associated with high performance computing (HPC). Many flows of practical interest also include moving and deforming boundaries. High fidelity computations of fluid-structure interactions (FSI) are amongst the most challenging problems in computational mechanics. Additionally, many FSI applications have different resolution requirements in different parts of the domain and therefore requirement adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) for computational efficiency. FLASH is a well established AMR code with an existing Lagrangian framework which could be augmented and exploited to implement an immersed boundary method for simulating fluid-structure interactions atop an existing infrastructure. This paper describes the augmentations to the Lagrangian framework, and the new parallel algorithms added to the FLASH infrastructure that enabled the implementation of immersed boundary method in FLASH. The paper also presents scaling behavior and performance analysis of the implementations.

SUMMARY FLASH is a multiphysics multiscale adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code originally designed for simulation of reactive flows often found in Astrophysics. With its wide user base and flexible applications configuration capability, FLASH has a dual task of maintaining scalability and portability in all its solvers. The scalability of fully explicit solvers in the code is tied very closely to that of the underlying mesh. Others such as the Poisson solver based on a multigrid method have more complex scaling behavior. Multigrid methods suffer from processor starvation and dominating communication costs at coarser grids with increase in the number of processors. In this paper, we propose a combination of uniform grid mesh with AMR mesh, and the merger of two different sets of solvers to overcome the scalability limitation of the Poisson solver in FLASH. The principal challenge in the proposed merger is the efficiency of the communication algorithm to map the mesh back and forth between uniform grid and AMR. We present two different parallel mapping algorithms and also discuss results from performance studies of the two implementations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.