Running times per iteration of
1. Introduction
The efficient solution of the Frank-Kamenetskii partial differential equation through the implementation of parallelized numerical algorithms or GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) in MATLAB is a natural progression of the work which has been conducted in an area of practical import. There is an on-going interest in the mathematics describing thermal explosions due to the significance of the applications of such models - one example is the chemical processes which occur in grain silos. Solutions which pertain to the different geometries of such a physical process have different physical interpretations, however in this chapter we will consider the Frank-Kamenetskii partial differential equation within the context of the mathematical theory of combustion which according to Frank-Kamenetskii [16] deals with the combined systems of equations of chemical kinetics and of heat transfer and diffusion. A physical explanation of such a system is often a gas confined within a vessel which then reacts chemically, heating up until it either attains a steady state or explodes.
The focus of this chapter is to investigate the performance of the parallelization power of the GPU vs. the computing power of the CPU within the context of the solution of the Frank-Kamenetskii partial differential equation. GPU computing is the use of a GPU as a co-processor to accelerate CPUs (Central Processing Units) for general purpose scientific and engineering computing. The GPU accelerates applications running on the CPU by offloading some of the compute-intensive and time consuming portions of the code. The rest of the application still runs on the CPU. The reason why the application is seen to run faster is because it is using the extreme parallel processing power of the GPU to boost performance. A CPU consists of 4 to 8 CPU cores while the GPU consists of 100s of smaller cores. Together they operate to crunch through the data in the application and as such it is this massive parallel architecture which gives the GPU its high compute performance.
The methods which will be investigated in this research are implicit methods, such as the Crank-Nicolson method (
The second hurdle is the nonlinear source term which may be dealt with using different techniques. In this chapter we will implement the Newton method which acts as an updating mechanism for the nonlinear source term and in so doing maintains the implicit nature of the scheme in a consistent fashion. While the incorporation of the Newton method leads to an increase in the computation time for the Crank-Nicolson difference scheme (see [22]) there is also an increase in the accuracy and stability of the solution. As such we find that the algorithms we are attempting to employ in the solution of this partial differential equation would benefit from the processing power of a GPU.
In this chapter we will focus on the implementation of the Crank-Nicolson implicit method, employed with and without the Newton method, and two Rosenbrock methods, namely ROS2 and ROWDA3. We consider the effectiveness of running the algorithms on the GPU rather than the CPU and discuss whether these algorithms can in fact be parallelized effectively.
2. Model
The steady state formulation of the equation to be considered in this chapter was described by Frank-Kamenetskii [16] who later also considered the time development of such a reaction. The reaction rate depends on the temperature in a nonlinear fashion, generally given by Arrhenius’ law. This nonlinearity is an important characteristic of the combustion phenomena since without it the critical condition for inflammation would disappear causing the idea of combustion to lose its meaning [16]. Thus, in the case of a thermal explosion, the Arrhenius law is maintained by the introduction of the exponential term which acts as a source for the heat generated by the chemical reaction. As such we are able to write an equation modelling the dimensionless temperature distribution in a vessel as
where
The value of the Frank-Kamanetskii parameter [16]
where
In this chapter we consider numerical solutions for equation (1) modelling a thermal explosion within a cylindrical vessel, i.e.
where
Frank-Kamenetskii [16] obtained a steady state solution to this problem with
In Harley [21] a Crank-Nicolson- and hopscotch scheme were implemented for equation (1) subject to (4) and (5) where
In recent work (see [22]) the Crank-Nicolson method was implemented with the Newton iteration as done by Britz et al. [9] by computing a correction set in each iteration to obtain approximate values of the dependent variable at the next time step. The efficiency of the Crank-Nicolson scheme, hopscotch scheme (both of these methods were implemented with an explicit and then an implicit discretisation of the source term) and two versions of the Rosenbrock method were compared [22]. Using the pdepe function in MATLAB and the steady state solution obtained by Frank-Kamenetskii [16] as a means of comparison, it was found that the incorporation of the Newton method for the Crank-Nicolson- and hopscotch scheme led to increased running times as
Furthermore, it was shown that while the Crank-Nicolson- and hopscotch method (with or without the implementation of the Newton method) performed well in terms of accuracy for
As a consequence of these findings and due to the complexity created by the nonlinear source term which serves a critical function in the model, further work regarding faster algorithms for the solution of such an equation are of interest. This chapter will not consider the hopscotch scheme directly as an appropriate method for the solution of the Frank-Kamenetskii partial differential equation due to work done by Feldberg [15] which indicated that for large values of
3. Executing MATLAB on a GPU
The advantage of using the Parallel Computing Toolbox in MATLAB is the fact that it allows one to solve computationally and data-intensive problems using multicore processors, GPUs, and computer clusters. In this manner one can parallelize numerical algorithms, and in so doing MATLAB applications, without CUDA or MPI programming. Parallelized algorithms such as parfor, used within the context of what is usually a for loop, allows you to offload work from one MATLAB session (the client) to other MATLAB sessions, called workers. You can use multiple workers to take advantage of parallel processing and in this way improve the performance of such loop execution by allowing several MATLAB workers to execute individual loop iterations simultaneously. In this context however we are not able to implement in-built MATLAB functions such as parfor due to the numerical algorithms which we have chosen to consider. The
The Parallel Computing Toolbox in MATLAB allows one to create data on and transfer it to the GPU so that the resulting GPU array can then be used as an input to enhance built-in functions that support them. The first thing to consider when implementing computations on the GPU is
In this chapter we are employing MATLAB under Windows 7 (64 bits) on a PC equipped with an i7 2.2 GHz processor with 32 GB of RAM.
3.1. Crank-Nicolson implicit scheme
We will implement the Crank-Nicolson method while maintaing the explicit nature of the nonlinear source term and also apply the method by computing a correction set in each iteration to obtain approximate values of the dependent variable at the next time step through the use of the Newton method [26]. The methodology will be explained briefly here; the reader is referred to [7, 8, 9] for clarification.
When implementing the Crank-Nicolson method we employ the following central-difference approximations for the second-and first-order spatial derivatives respectively
while a forward-difference approximation
is used for the time derivative. We implement a Crank-Nicolson scheme by approximating the second-derivative on the right-hand side of (1) by the implicit Crank-Nicolson [12] approximation
In a similar fashion the first-derivative on the right-hand side becomes
To impose zero-shear boundary conditions at the edges we approximate the spatial first-derivative by the central-difference approximation (7) which leads to the following condition
As mentioned before the boundary condition (5a) at
which simplifies the equation for the case
to equation (1) at
as the initial difference scheme with
where
As indicated by the boundary conditions (5a) and (5b) we consider the problem for
and is solved as follows
The inverse of
3.2. Rosenbrock method
We now consider two particular Rosenbrock methods, ROS2 and ROWDA3, as a means of comparison for the effectiveness of the methods discussed in the previous section. The Rosenbrock methods belong to the class of linearly implicit Runge - Kutta methods [11, 17]. They were used successfully for the numerical solution of non-electrochemical stiff partial differential equations, including equations of interest to electrochemistry. For further information regarding the particulars of such methods interested readers are referred to the numerical literature of [17, 28, 29, 30].
The reason for the use of the Rosenbrock methods in this paper is the ease with which they are able to deal with the nonlinear source term and the fact that no Newton iterations are necessary. The advantages of these methods are great efficiency, stability and a smooth error response if ROS2 or ROWDA3 are used (see [4] for instance) and the ease with which they are able to handle time-dependent and/or nonlinear systems.
We consider equation (1) as the following system
which along with
where
such that
In order to implement the Rosenbrock methods a number
where we define
where the
In this chapter we implement the ROS2 and ROWDA3 methods though there are other variants of the Rosenbrock methods. Lang [24] described a L-stable second-order formula called ROS2. A third-order variant thereof is called ROWDA3 and described by Roche [28] and later made more efficient by Lang [23]. The latter is a method favoured by Bieniasz who introduced Rosenbrock methods to electrochemical digital simulation [4, 5]. For a more detailed explanation and discussion regarding the method and its advantages refer to [7]. The focus of the work done here is with regards to whether the Rosenbrock algorithms lend themselves toward parallelized implementation. It has already been noted that functions such as the parfor command cannot be used in this instance. It now remains to consider the method’s performance when run on a GPU via the MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox.
4. Discussion of numerical results
The results noticed, as per Table 1, indicate the extent to which implementing the code on the GPU slows down overall performance of the
To gain a better understanding of these results we consider the baseline structure for our
In doing so, we realise that the main components thereof are matrix and elementwise vector operations. In order to understand why we are achieving the results we do (see Table 1) we run a few simple ’test’-codes to consider the speed taken by the CPU vs. the GPU to perform such elementary operations as
The next step in this evaluative process is to now consider the speed at which vector operations are performed. This was done in a similar fashion to the previous case by considering the speed taken by the CPU and GPU to perform the elementwise operation
CPU | 7.8449e-05 | 2.7737e-04 | 2.3002e-05 | 9.1288e-05 |
GPU | 0.0014 | 0.0960 | 0.0033 | 0.0063 |
CPU | 1.4783e-05 | 2.0018e-04 | 1.5354e-05 | 6.3574e-05 |
GPU | 8.0940e-04 | 0.0047 | 0.0028 | 0.0047 |
CPU | 2.4573e-05 | 0.0033 | 1.7146e-05 | 6.8119e-05 |
GPU | 0.0048 | 0.4731 | 0.0042 | 0.0073 |
.0137 | 0.0025 | 0.0059 | 0.0138 |
.0133 | 0.0024 | 0.0067 | 0.0149 |
.0146 | 0.0025 | 0.0057 | 0.0128 |
.0145 | 0.0024 | 0.0059 | 0.0133 |
.0146 | 0.0012 | 0.0064 | 0.0150 |
.0275 | 0.0026 | 0.0061 | 0.0160 |
.0151 | 0.0030 | 0.0062 | 0.0151 |
.0160 | 0.0042 | 0.0063 | 0.0140 |
As a means of further investigation we consider the
4.1. Influence of changing parameter values on the running time of the algorithms
Just a few brief comments upon the results obtained for
5. Concluding remarks
The implementation of numerical algorithms such as those considered in this chapter are widely used for the solution of many differential equations which model physical processes and applications. As such it is of vital importance that we be able to perform such calculations at high speed given the requirement of fine grids to improve accuracy. It is in this context that the use of GPUs becomes of prime importance. However it is not simply a matter of running the algorithm on the GPU - the method employed needs to lend itself to being adjusted in the required manner so that the parallel processing power of the GPU may be taken advantage of. Though we found that the numerical methods considered here were not entirely suited to being implemented on the GPU as we would have hoped we were able to explain why this was the case.
This work has investigated the effectiveness of matrix and elementwise operations when run on a GPU vs. a CPU and found that the speed taken to do such operations heavily relies on the choice of
We also discovered the power of the in-built function arrayfun which was able to improve upon the performance of the GPU with regards to computing time to the degree that it outperformed the CPU even for a grid with ’large’
What the work in this chapter has shown is that the structures of the GPU and the Parallel Computing Toolbox in MATLAB are such that while certain algorithms have the ability to be adjusted for improved performance not all methods do. In particular it seems clear that implicit methods with matrix and vector operations will in fact run much slower on the GPU than the CPU. Thus whether GPU computing is able to improve the performance of a numerical scheme is very much dependent upon the type of computations which need to be done. In our case we discovered that the implicit and nonlinear nature of our numerical schemes do not lend themselves towards improved performance via the implementation of the parallel processing power of a GPU.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Mr. Dario Fanucchi for invaluable discussions.
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