Fast, feature-rich weakly-compressible SPH on GPU: coding strategies and compiler choices

07/22/2022

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by   Giuseppe Bilotta, et al.

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GPUSPH was the first implementation of the weakly-compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method to run entirely on GPU using CUDA. Version 5, released in June 2018, features a radical restructuring of the code, offering a more structured implementation of several features and specialized optimization of most heavy-duty computational kernels. While these improvements have led to a measurable performance boost (ranging from 15% to 30% depending on the test case and hardware configuration), it has also uncovered some of the limitations of the official CUDA compiler () offered by NVIDIA, especially in regard to developer friendliness. This has led to an effort to support alternative compilers, particularly Clang, with surprising performance gains.