Accelerating Physics Simulations with TPUs: An Inundation Modeling Example

21 Apr 2022  ·  Damien Pierce, R. Lily Hu, Yusef Shafi, Anudhyan Boral, Vladimir Anisimov, Sella Nevo, Yi-fan Chen ·

Recent advancements in hardware accelerators such as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) speed up computation time relative to Central Processing Units (CPUs) not only for machine learning but, as demonstrated here, also for scientific modeling and computer simulations. To study TPU hardware for distributed scientific computing, we solve partial differential equations (PDEs) for the physics simulation of fluids to model riverine floods. We demonstrate that TPUs achieve a two orders of magnitude speedup over CPUs. Running physics simulations on TPUs is publicly accessible via the Google Cloud Platform, and we release a Python interactive notebook version of the simulation.

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Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Computational Physics

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