Accelerating multi-dimensional population balance model simulations via a highly scalable framework using GPUs

The solution of high-dimensional PBMs using CPUs are often computationally intractable. This study focuses on the development of a scalable algorithm to parallelize the nested loops inside the PBM via a GPU framework. The developed PBM is unique since it adapts to the size of the problem and uses the GPU cores accordingly. This algorithm was parallelized for NVIDIA (R) GPUs as it was written in CUDA (R) and C/C++. The major bottleneck of such algorithms is the communication time between the CPU and the GPU. In our studies, communication time contributed to less than 1% of the total run time and a maximum speedup of about 12 over the serial CPU code was achieved. The GPU PBM achieved a speedup of about two times compared to the PBM's multi-core configuration on a desktop computer. The speed improvements are also reported for various CPU and GPU architectures and configurations. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.