Application of general-purpose computation on GPUs to geotechnical engineering

Because of the complex geological conditions of geotechnical engineering and its increasing project scale, the requirements of the calculation speed for large-scale numerical simulation become more strict. Graphics processing unit (GPU), the core unit of graphics card, can solve this problem with the advantages of parallel computing, high-speed floating-point performance and high memory bandwidth. The hardware architecture differences between GPU and CPU are analyzed firstly. Then the advantages and disadvantages of CPU and GPU are summarized; the development and achievement of general-purpose computation on GPU are described in detail. Finally, an example about application of GPU to stochastic differential equations of permeability is given; the advantage of GPU is displayed and the application of GPU computing to geotechnical engineering is discussed.