Multi-GPU acceleration of direct pore-scale modeling of fluid flow in natural porous media

Modified Moving Particle Semi-implicit (MMPS) is a particle-based method used to simulate pore-scale fluid flow through disordered porous media. We present a multi-CPU implementation of MMPS for hybrid CPU CPU clusters using NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Message Passing Interface (MPI) functions are used to communicate between different nodes of the cluster and hence their respective CPUs. The accuracy and stability of the CPU implementation of MMPS are verified through careful comparison with the results obtained on conventional CPU-only clusters. We then examine the speedup and scalability of the CPU implementation for pore-scale flow simulations in samples with various sizes taken from the same natural porous system. We achieve a 134x speedup with 60 graphics cards compared to 6 CPU cores while maintaining a linear scalability. Incompressible fluid flow simulation to reach steady-stare through a 1 mm x 1 mm x 8 mm microtomography image of Bentheimer sandstone is also performed in less than 1 h. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.