On the effective implementation of a boundary element code on graphics processing units using an out-of-core LU algorithm

A collocation boundary element code for solving the three-dimensional Laplace equation, publicly available from http://intetec.org, has been adapted to run on an Nvidia Tesla general-purpose graphics processing unit (CPU). Global matrix assembly and LU factorization of the resulting dense matrix are performed on the CPU. Out-of-core techniques are used to solve problems larger than the available CPU memory. The code achieved about 10 times speedup in matrix assembly over a single CPU core and about 56 Gflops/s in the LU factorization using only 512 Mbytes of GPU memory. Details of the CPU implementation and comparisons with the standard sequential algorithm are included to illustrate the performance of the CPU code. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.