High-performance and low-cost computing for indoor airflow

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can provide detailed information of flow motion, temperature distributions and species dispersion in buildings. However, it may take hours or days, even weeks to simulate airflow in a building by using CFD on a single central processing unit (CPU) computer. Parallel computing on a multi-CPU supercomputer or computer cluster can reduce the computing time, but the cost for such high performance computing is prohibitive for many designers. Our paper introduces high performance parallel computing of the airflow simulations on a graphics processing unit (GPU). The computing time can be reduced by 10 - 30 times using the GPU. Furthermore, the cost of purchasing such a GPU is only $500, which is less than 2% of a multi-CPU supercomputer or a computer cluster for the same performance.