A fast and interactive heat conduction simulator on GPUs

GPU offers a number of unique benefits to scientific simulation and visualization. Its superior computing capability and interoperability with graphics library are two of those that make GPU the platform of choice. In this paper, we present a fast and interactive heat conduction simulator on GPUs using CUDA and OpenGL. The numerical solution of a two‐dimensional heat conduction equation is decomposed into two directions to solve tridiagonal linear systems. To achieve fast simulation, a widely used implicit solver, alternating direction implicit (ADI) is accelerated on GPUs using GPU‐based parallel tridiagonal solvers. We investigate the performance bottleneck of the solver and optimize it with several methods. In addition, we conduct thorough evaluations of the GPU‐based ADI solver performance with three different tridiagonal solvers. Furthermore, our design takes advantage of efficient CUDA–OpenGL interoperability to make the simulation interactive in real‐time. The proposed interactive visualization simulator can be served as a building block for numerous advanced emergency management systems in engineering practices.