Vibration soil isolation analysis based on a 3-D frequency domain Direct Boundary Element implementation: GPGPU acceleration

Abstract A Direct Boundary Element implementation was accelerated by using General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) to improve the performance in analysis of soil vibration isolation with trenches. The Boundary Element formulation is based on the 3D full space stationary fundamental (visco)elastic solutions. In this stationary Dynamic Soil-Structure Interaction (DSSI) problem, the soil is externally excited generating a propagation wave field. This resulting field induces vibrations on structures in the surrounding soil. Aiming to reduce the time required to calculate the vibration soil behavior, a code was developed with CUDA C++ and OpenMP to explore the capabilities provided by GPUs and multi-core CPUs. The performance analysis is conducted by comparing codes in two modes: one uses exclusively CPU and the other is GPU-accelerated. The implementation presents the vibration reduction as well as comparisons of computation time and speedup for two groups of CPU and GPU. The speedup ratios range from 8 to 60 comparing to the sequential version.