An Euler solver accelerator in FPGA for computational fluid dynamics applications

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of accelerating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications, utilized by aeronautical engineers to create more efficient and aerodynamic designs. CFD applications require intensive floating point calculations, so they are usually executed on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Here, we study the HW implementation of a cell-vertex finite volume algorithm to solve Euler equations, using the XtremeData XD2000i in-socket FPGA accelerator. Taking advantage of high-level language synthesis tools together with optimized low level components, a HW-accelerated implementation that achieved speedups up to 13.25x could be created in a short time.