Efficient topology optimization using GPU computing with multilevel granularity

This paper proposes a well-suited strategy for High Performance Computing (HPC) of density-based topology optimization using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Such a strategy takes advantage of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures to overcome the computationally demanding procedures of density-based topology design, both in terms of memory consumption and processing time. This is done exploiting data locality and minimizing both memory consumption and data transfers. The proposed GPU instance makes use of different granularities for the topology optimization pipeline, which are selected to properly balance the workload between the threads exploiting the parallelizatibn potential of massively parallel architectures. The performance of the fine-grained GPU instance of the solving stage is evaluated using two preconditioning techniques. The proposal is also compared with the classical CPU implementation for diverse topology optimization problems, including stiffness maximization, heat sink design and compliant mechanism design. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.