Journal of Hydroinformatics Vol 14 No 3 pp 603–612 © IWA Publishing 2012 doi:10.2166/hydro.2011.023

The potential of graphical processing units to solve hydraulic network equations

P. A. Crous, J. E. van Zyl and Y. Roodt

The Engineering discipline has relied on computers to perform numerical calculations in many of its sub-disciplines over the last decades. The advent of graphical processing units (GPUs), parallel stream processors, has the potential to speed up generic simulations that facilitate engineering applications aside from traditional computer graphics applications, using GPGPU (general purpose programming on the GPU). The potential benefits of exploiting the GPU for general purpose computation require the program to be highly arithmetic intensive and also data independent. This paper looks at the specific application of the Conjugate Gradient method used in hydraulic network solvers on the GPU and compares the results to conventional central processing unit (CPU) implementations. The results indicate that the GPU becomes more efficient as the data set size increases. However, with the current hardware and the implementation of the Conjugate Gradient algorithm, the application of stream processing to hydraulic network solvers is only faster and more efficient for exceptionally large water distribution models, which are seldom found in practice.

Keywords: computer programming; GPGPU; hydraulic modeling

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