Evaluation of FPGA Hardware as a New Approach for Accelerating the Numerical Solution of CFD Problems

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) chips as alternatives for the conventional CPUs to accelerate the numerical solution of the fluid dynamics differential equations. FPGA is an integrated circuit that contains an array of logic blocks, and its architecture can be reprogrammed and reconfigured after manufacturing. Complex circuits for various applications can be designed and implemented using FPGA hardware. The reconfigurable hardware used in this paper is a system on a chip FPGA type that integrates both microprocessor and FPGA architectures into a single device. In this paper, typical computational fluid dynamics problems, such as the Laplace and 1-D Euler equations, are implemented and solved numerically on both reconfigurable hardware and CPU. The precision of results and speedups of the calculations is compared together. In some cases, the computational process on FPGA is up to 20 times faster than a conventional CPU, with the same data precision. Several numerical and analytical solutions are used to validate the results.