Towards Accelerated Computation of Atmospheric Equations Using CUDA

Main objective of this paper is to outline possible ways how to achieve a substantial acceleration in case of advection-diffusion equation (A-DE) calculation, which is commonly used for a description of the pollutant behavior in atmosphere. A-DE is a kind of partial differential equation (PDE) and in general case it is usually solved by numerical integration due to its high complexity. These types of calculations are time consuming thus the main idea of our work is to adopt CUDA platform and commodity GPU card to do the calculations in a faster way. The solution is based on method of lines with 4^th order Runge-Kutta scheme to handle the integration. As a matter of fact, the selected approach involves number of auxiliary variables and thus the memory management is critical in order to achieve desired performance. We have implemented several possible solutions that use different memory access schemes. Detailed evaluation is provided in this paper where the obtained results show a tremendous processing speed up in comparison to CPU.