GPU Acceleration of a Cloud Resolving Model Using CUDA

The increasing computing power of graphics processing units (GPU) has motivated the use of GPUs to speed up climate models. Their low price in conjunction with C style parallel programming tools, like CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), allow the programmers, even non-programmers, to exploit the fine grain parallelism power of GPU conveniently. In this paper, we report successful acceleration of a Cloud Resolving Model (CRM) by implementing the MPDATA algorithm on the GPU using CUDA. The results show the great speedup potential for GPU acceleration of CRM which could carry over to other atmospheric models.