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Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)

High performance simulations of turbulent clouds on a desktop PC: exploiting the GPU

Jerome Schalkwijk, Eric Griffith, Frits H. Post, and H.J.J. Jonker

A screenshot of an interactive simulation with GALES. The 3D cloud field visualization is shown using volume rendering. During the simulation, the visualization can be actively zoomed and rotated to directly obtain insight into the simulation process.

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Processor clock speeds have increased exponentially over the last several decades. This has gone a long way toward supplying the necessary computational power for running these numerical simulations. Computational clusters and supercomputing facilities now have computing nodes with traditional processors, specialized processors, or both. The number of processing cores in computing nodes is also increasing. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is becoming a mature platform for running numerical simulations. It was designed to perform the intensive matrix projection calculations associated with gaming graphics. In order to efficiently and quickly perform such calculations, modern GPUs are designed as massively parallel calculating devices. In order to effectively utilize the full power of today' supercomputer through large-scale parallelization, relatively large problem sizes are required.

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Citation

Jerome Schalkwijk, Eric Griffith, Frits H. Post, and H.J.J. Jonker, High performance simulations of turbulent clouds on a desktop PC: exploiting the GPU, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), 93, pp. 307–314, 2012.

BibTex 

@article{bib:schalkwijk:2012,
    author       = { Schalkwijk, Jerome and Griffith, Eric and Post, Frits H. and Jonker, H.J.J. },    
    title        = { High performance simulations of turbulent clouds on a desktop PC: exploiting the GPU },
    journal      = { Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) },
    volume       = { 93 },
    year         = { 2012 },
    pages        = { 307--314 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/392 },
}