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GPU Acceleration for FEM-Based Structural Analysis

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Abstract

Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) have greatly exceeded their initial role of graphics accelerators and have taken a new role of co-processors for computation—heavy tasks. Both hardware and software ecosystems have now matured, with fully IEEE compliant double precision and memory correction being supported and a rich set of software tools and libraries being available. This in turn has lead to their increased adoption in a growing number of fields, both in academia and, more recently, in industry. In this review we investigate the adoption of GPUs as accelerators in the field of Finite Element Structural Analysis, a design tool that is now essential in many branches of engineering. We survey the work that has been done in accelerating the most time consuming steps of the analysis, indicate the speedup that has been achieved and, where available, highlight software libraries and packages that will enable the reader to take advantage of such acceleration. Overall, we try to draw a high level picture of where the state of the art is currently at.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd., Hayes Park Central, Hayes, UB4 8FE, UK

    Serban Georgescu & Peter Chow

  2. Dept. of Human and Engineered Environmental Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwanoha 5-1-5, Kashiwa, Chiba, 277-8563, Japan

    Hiroshi Okuda

Authors
  1. Serban Georgescu
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  2. Peter Chow
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  3. Hiroshi Okuda
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Correspondence to Serban Georgescu.

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Georgescu, S., Chow, P. & Okuda, H. GPU Acceleration for FEM-Based Structural Analysis. Arch Computat Methods Eng 20, 111–121 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-013-9082-8

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