High speed computing of ice thickness equation for ice sheet model

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2-D) ice flow thermodynamics coupled model acts as a vital role for visualizing the ice sheet behaviours of the Antarctica region and the climate system. One of the parameters used in this model is ice thickness. Explicit method of finite difference method (FDM) is used to discretize the ice thickness equation. After that, the equation will be performed on Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming by using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platform. Nowadays, the demand of GPU for solving the computational problem has been increasing due to the low price and high performance computation properties. This paper investigates the performance of GPU hardware supported by the CUDA parallel programming and capable to compute a large sparse complex system of the ice thickness equation of 2D ice flow thermodynamics model using multiple cores simultaneously and efficiently. The parallel performance evaluation (PPE) is evaluated in terms of execution time, speedup, efficiency, effectiveness and temporal performance.