Accelerating a barotropic ocean model using a GPU

The two-dimensional barotropic vorticity equation is one of the basic equations of ocean dynamics. It is important to have efficient numerical solution techniques to solve this equation. In this paper, we present an implementation of a numerical solution using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The speedup of the calculation on the GPU with respect to that on a CPU depends on the grid size, but reaches a factor of about 50 for resolutions from 2049 × 2049 up to 4097 × 4097. It may therefore be efficient to use green GPUs in future high-resolution ocean modelling studies.

► New fast Poisson solver in CUDA on the GPU.
► Efficient implementation of barotropic vorticity equation on a GPU.
► Substantial acceleration (factor 50) of the ocean model using a GPU.