GPU Acceleration of a Non-hydrostatic Ocean Model with a Multigrid Poisson/Helmholtz solver

Abstract

To meet the demand for fast and detailed calculations in numerical ocean simulations, we implemented a non-hydrostatic ocean model on a graphics processing unit (GPU). We improved the model's Poisson/Helmholtz solver by optimizing the memory access, using instruction-level parallelism, and applying a mixed precision calculation to the preconditioning of the Poisson/Helmholtz solver. The GPU-implemented model was 4.7 times faster than a comparable central processing unit execution. The output errors due to this implementation will not significantly influence oceanic studies.