Accelerating Moderately Stiff Chemical Kinetics in Reactive-Flow Simulations using GPUs

Authors: K. E. Niemeyer and C. J. Sung

Direct link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2013.09.025

Abstract:

The chemical kinetics ODEs arising from operator-split reactive-flow simulations were solved on GPUs using explicit integration algorithms. Nonstiff chemical kinetics of a hydrogen oxidation mechanism (9 species and 38 irreversible reactions) were computed using the explicit fifth-order Runge–Kutta–Cash–Karp method, and the GPU-accelerated version performed faster than single- and six-core CPU versions by factors of 126 and 25, respectively, for 524,288 ODEs. Moderately stiff kinetics, represented with mechanisms for hydrogen/carbon-monoxide (13 species and 54 irreversible reactions) and methane (53 species and 634 irreversible reactions) oxidation, were computed using the stabilized explicit second-order Runge–Kutta–Chebyshev (RKC) algorithm. The GPU-based RKC implementation demonstrated an increase in performance of nearly 59 and 10 times, for problem sizes consisting of 262,144 ODEs and larger, than the single- and six-core CPU-based RKC algorithms using the hydrogen/carbon-monoxide mechanism. With the methane mechanism, RKC-GPU performed more than 65 and 11 times faster, for problem sizes consisting of 131,072 ODEs and larger, than the single- and six-core RKC-CPU versions, and up to 57 times faster than the six-core CPU-based implicit VODE algorithm on 65,536 ODEs. In the presence of more severe stiffness, such as ethylene oxidation (111 species and 1566 irreversible reactions), RKC-GPU performed more than 17 times faster than RKC-CPU on six cores for 32,768 ODEs and larger, and at best 4.5 times faster than VODE on six CPU cores for 65,536 ODEs. With a larger time step size, RKC-GPU performed at best 2.5 times slower than six-core VODE for 8192 ODEs and larger. Therefore, the need for developing new strategies for integrating stiff chemistry on GPUs was discussed.

CitationK. E. Niemeyer and C. J. Sung, “Accelerating Moderately Stiff Chemical Kinetics in Reactive-Flow Simulations using GPUs,” Journal of Computational Physics 256, 854-871 (2014).