Scientific computation for simulations on programmable graphics hardware

Graphics processor units (GPUs) have emerged as powerful parallel processors in recent years. Although floating point computations and high level programming languages are now available, the efficient use of the enormous computing power of GPUs still requires a significant amount of graphics specific knowledge. The paper explains how to use GPUs for scientific computations without graphics specific terminology. It offers an algorithmic view on GPUs with comparisons to cache aware and parallel programming of CPUs. Two typical simulation techniques, namely grid based and particle based methods are discussed. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.