GPU accelerated chemistry

As part of the Blue Waters graduate fellowship I developed a framework for accelerating networks of coupled stiff ODEs using GPUs.

As a 2018-2019 Blue Waters Graduate Fellow I developed a GPU accelerated version of the non-equilibrium chemistry solver CHIMES, developed by Dr. Alex Richings– a former postdoc in the Northwestern Galaxy Formation group. CHIMES was recently coupled to the FIRE simulation code and when enabled can dominate up to 95% of the computational time, making it prohibitively expensive to use in already expensive high-resolution studies. However, by offloading the chemistry calculation and integrating the equations on a GPU we will be able to bring the non-equilibrium chemistry in line with the rest of the cost of the simulation allowing us to run at the high resolutions we require for our science cases. To that end, I created WIND, a CUDA application that integrates general coupled stiff ODES. The next step is to apply WIND to the CHIMES chemical network and integrate it into the FIRE simulations.