Regular Article

Parallel Thomas approach development for solving tridiagonal systems in GPU programming − steady and unsteady flow simulation

¹ Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Semnan, Iran
² School of Engineering Science, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

^* e-mail: akbarzad@ut.ac.ir

Received: 27 November 2017
Accepted: 6 February 2020

Abstract

The solution of tridiagonal system of equations using graphic processing units (GPU) is assessed. The parallel-Thomas-algorithm (PTA) is developed and the solution of PTA is compared to two known parallel algorithms, i.e. cyclic-reduction (CR) and parallel-cyclic-reduction (PCR). Lid-driven cavity problem is considered to assess these parallel approaches. This problem is also simulated using the classic Thomas algorithm that runs on a central processing unit (CPU). Runtimes and physical parameters of the mentioned GPU and CPU algorithms are compared. The results show that the speedup of CR, PCR and PTA against the CPU runtime is 4.4x,5.2x and 38.5x, respectively. Furthermore, the effect of coalesced and uncoalesced memory access to GPU global memory is examined for PTA, and a 2x-speedup is achieved for the coalesced memory access. Additionally, the PTA performance in a time dependent problem, the unsteady flow over a square, is assessed and a 9x-speedup is obtained against the CPU.