Ice Simulation Using GPGPU

Simulation of the behaviour of a ship operating in pack ice is a computationally intensive process to which General Purpose Computing on Graphical Processing Units (GPGPU) can be applied. In this paper we present an efficient parallel implementation of such a simulator developed using the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). We have conducted an experiment to measure the relative performance of the parallel and serial versions of the simulator by running both versions on several different ice fields for several iterations to compare the performance. Our results show speed up of up to 77 times, reducing simulation time for a small ice field from over 88 minutes to about 68 seconds.