GPU Acceleration of VULCAN-CFD

Abstract

This work presents a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in the application of GraphicsProcessing Units (GPUs) to accelerate the NASA-developed VULCAN-CFD code for hypersonic flow sim-ulations. The unstructured solver in VULCAN-CFD is undergoing a significant rewrite from modern Fortranto C++, enabling its execution on both GPUs and CPUs through the utilization of Kokkos, a programmingmodel for performance portability developed by Sandia National Labs. The paper outlines some modifica-tions that were made in the original implementation of VULCAN-CFD in order to harness the computationalpower of GPUs. Finally, we demonstrate performance improvements achieved through GPU acceleration.The accelerated code throughput on one GPU is shown to match approximately 200 CPU cores for bothsingle species and multi-species reacting cases.