GPU-based parallel method of temperature field analysis in a floor heater with a controller

Abstract

Abstract A parallel method enabling acceleration of the numerical analysis of the transient temperature field in an air floor heating system is presented in this paper. An initial-boundary value problem of the heater regulated by an on/off controller is formulated. The analogue model is discretized using the implicit finite difference method. The BiCGStab method is used to compute the obtained system of equations. A computer program implementing simultaneous computations on CPUand GPU(GPGPUtechnology) was developed. CUDA environment and linear algebra libraries (CUBLAS and CUSPARSE) are used by this program. The time of computations was reduced eight times in comparison with a program executed on the CPU only. Results of computations are presented in the form of time profiles and temperature field distributions. An influence of a model of the heat transfer coefficient on the simulation of the system operation was examined. The physical interpretation of obtained results is also presented.Results of computations were verified by comparing them with solutions obtained with the use of a commercial program - COMSOL Mutiphysics.