Anwendung von massiv paralleler Berechnung mit Grafikkarten (GPGPU) für CFD-Methoden im Brandschutz

Application of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) in CFD techniques for fire safety simulations.

The use of fire simulation programs based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques is becoming more and more widespread in practice. The increase in available computing power enables the effects of possible fire scenarios to be modelled in order to derive useful information for practical applications (e.g. analysis of the reliability of fire protection concepts). However, despite the progress in computing power the performance of currently available computers is inadequate for simulating a building fire including all relevant physical and chemical processes with maximum accuracy. The models for calculating the spread of fire and smoke implemented in the computer programs therefore always represent a compromise between practical computing efficiency and level of modelling detail. This paper illustrates the reasons for the high computing power demand of CFD techniques and describes potential problems and sources of error resulting from simplifications applied in the models. In addition, the paper presents a new technology approach that significantly increases the computing power of a PC using special software and standard 3D graphics cards. The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is used as an example to demonstrate how the required calculation time for a fire simulation on a PC can be reduced by a factor of 20 and more.