GPU and APU computations of Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent fields

We present GPU and APU accelerated computations of Finite-Time Lyapunov Exponent (FILE) fields. The calculation of FTLEs is a computationally intensive process, as in order to obtain the sharp ridges associated with the Lagrangian Coherent Structures an extensive resampling of the flow field is required. The computational performance of this resampling is limited by the memory bandwidth of the underlying computer architecture. The present technique harnesses data-parallel execution of many-core architectures and relies on fast and accurate evaluations of moment conserving functions for the mesh to particle interpolations. We demonstrate how the computation of FTLEs can be efficiently performed on a GPU and on an APU through OpenCL and we report over one order of magnitude improvements over multi-threaded executions in FILE computations of bluff body flows. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.