• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.160-166
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• 2012

This paper presents a Reynolds equation solver for hydrostatic gas bearings, implemented to run on graphics processing units (GPUs). The original analysis code for the central processing unit (CPU) was modified for the GPU by using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA). The red-black Gauss-Seidel (RBGS) algorithm was employed instead of the original Gauss-Seidel algorithm for the iterative pressure solver, because the latter has data dependency between neighboring nodes. The implemented GPU program was tested on the nVidia GTX580 system and compared to the original CPU program on the AMD Llano system. In the iterative pressure calculation, the implemented GPU program showed 20-100 times faster performance than the original CPU codes. Comparison of the wall-clock times including all of pre/post processing codes showed that the GPU codes still delivered 4-12 times faster performance than the CPU code for our target problem.