[Beowulf] What class of PDEs/numerical schemes suitable for GPU clusters

[Jeff Layton]

>> what I understand GPUs are useful only with certain classes of numerical
>> problems and discretization schemes, and of course the code must be

> I think it's fair to say that GPUs are good for graphics-like loads,
> or more generally: fairly small data, accessed data-parallel or with 
> very regular and limited sharing, with high work-per-data.

>From my limited experience I would agree. Getting to the high work-per-data is absolutely key to getting the huge speedups.

>> I'm part of a group that is purchasing our first beowulf cluster for a
>> climate model and an estuary model using Chombo
>> (http://seesar.lbl.gov/ANAG/chombo/). Getting up to speed (ha) on

> offhand, I'd guess that adaptive grids will be substantially harder 
> to run efficiently on a GPU than a uniform grid.

One key thing is that unstructured grid codes don't work as well. The problem is the indirect addressing.

I know two of the developers at Nvidia and both are CFD gurus - I will ping them to get more details because I know they were looking at this (unstructured vs. structured).

Jeff

P.S. I had to do the indentation by hand on this stupid email web-based email tool :)
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