The Defense Threat Reduction Agency wants to run military CFD simulations on GPUs

[Phew]

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In the latest DTRA Small Business Innovation Research solicitation, this agency is requesting proposals from small businesses to develop a CFD code optimized to run on GPUs. They want to simulate 'external blast events in urban settings' and 'internal blasts inside structures'.

I know that the CFD simulations we run are typically limited by memory bandwidth, something GPUs have to spare. Where is that guy with 23 GTX 295s? The DTRA wants YOU!

 

[SunnyD]

Uh, they're looking for someone to design and develop the code to do this, not someone with the hardware to do it.

 

[alyarb]

they'll probably wind up with something in intel ct. if that is going to get shoved off onto the whole industry, you know the government is on board.


who is going to make CFD programs for CUDA?

 

[Phew]

SunnyD humor fail.

I am keenly aware of what they want, CFD simulations are a big part of my job. I just thought it was interesting that the DoD is pushing GPU computing to the forefront.

 

[alyarb]

i think the "secret" of GPGPU is pretty much out in the open. there are cheap, power efficient teraflops with heaps of memory bandwidth available compared to what HPC clusters offer. but there is that little software caveat.

 

[Phew]

I don't see a company like ANSYS implementing GPU computing in Fluent or CFX. Their business model relies on charging absurd per-core parallelization fees. Really, the slower the code runs, the more money they make.

ANSYS isn't a small business anyway, but hopefully some small commercial CFD company sees opportunity here.

 

[Wreckage]

There are numerous college courses that teach CUDA programming (such as at MIT). I bet someone there could write this program for extra credit.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Wreckage
There are numerous college courses that teach CUDA programming (such as at MIT). I bet someone there could write this program for extra credit.

I hardly think anyone will be writing a DoD-quality simulator in their spare time. SBIR's generally have a rigorous process to follow, and odds are it will get tied up in the design phase far longer than a single semester of classes.