Revolutionizing OpenFOAM: GPU Integration for Unleashing the Power of Computational Fluid Dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has achieved tremendous success in research and industrial communities partly due to the emergence of accelerator devices like graphics processing units (GPUs) that enable the exploration of systems and timescales that were not feasible before. GPUs offer substantial performance advancements, with expectations of becoming the primary source of raw floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) in upcoming exascale machines. However, fully leveraging these benefits necessitates the reformulation of existing CFD codes.

While widely used commercial CFD software packages such as Fluent and STAR-CCM+ have successfully transitioned to GPU architectures, the open-source CFD community has yet to witness a commensurate transformation. Despite some external research attempts to migrate OpenFOAM, a widely adopted open-source CFD code with over 1.3 million lines of code, to GPUs, the core functionality of the code still predominantly relies on central processing units (CPUs).

In this talk, we will present our efforts to fully adapt OpenFOAM to leverage GPUs. This includes migrating the entire calculation workflow to the GPU, as well as enabling volume rendering visualization on GPU. By utilizing the latest GPUs, we have observed significant speed improvements, achieving performance gains of 3 to 10 times compared to the latest CPU servers. These enhancements have been attained through meticulous optimization, and they carry profound implications for researchers and engineers seeking faster and more efficient CFD simulations.