Abstract: With the recent developments in computing technology, increased efforts have gone into simulation of various scientific methods and phenomenon in engineering fields. One such case is the simulation of heat and mass transfer equations which is becoming more and more important in analyzing various scenarios in engineering applications. Analyzing the heat and mass transfer phenomenon in a thermal environment requires us to simulate it. However, this process of numerical solution of heat and mass transfer equation is very much time consuming. Therefore, this paper aims at utilizing one of the acceleration techniques developed in the graphics community that exploits a graphics processing unit (GPU) which is applied to the numerical solutions of heat and mass transfer equations. The nVidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model caters a good method of applying parallel computing to program the graphical processing unit. This paper shows a good improvement in the performance while solving the heat and mass transfer equations for solid and hollow capillary porous cylinder with the Natural boundary conditions and initial conditions numerically running on GPU. This heat and mass transfer simulation is implemented using CUDA platform on nVidia Quadro FX 4800 graphics card. Our experimental results depict the drastic performance improvement when GPU is used to perform heat and mass transfer simulation. GPU can significantly accelerate the performance with a maximum observed speedup of more than 8 fold. Therefore, the GPU is a good approach to accelerate the heat and mass transfer simulation.
Keywords: Numerical Solution; Heat and Mass Transfer; General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit; CUDA.