CUDA-C implementation of the ADER-DG method for linear hyperbolic PDEs

Abstract. We implement the ADER-DG numerical method using the CUDA-C language to run the code in a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). We focus on solving linear hyperbolic partial differential equations where the method can be expressed as a combination of precomputed matrix multiplications becoming a good candidate to be used on the GPU hardware. Moreover, the method is arbitrarily high-order involving intensive work on local data, a property that is also beneficial for the target hardware. We compare our GPU implementation against CPU versions of the same method observing similar convergence properties up to a threshold where the error remains fixed. This behaviour is in agreement with the CPU version but the threshold is larger that in the CPU case. We also observe a big difference when considering single and double precision where in the first case the threshold error is significantly larger. Finally, we did observe a speed up factor in computational time but this is relative to the specific test or benchmark problem.