GPU Particle Tracking and MHD Simulations with Greatly Enhanced Computational Speed

GPUs are intrinsically highly parallelized systems that provide more than an order of magnitude computing speed over a CPU based systems, for less cost than a high end-workstation. Recent advancements in GPU technologies allow for full IEEE float specifications with performance up to several hundred GFLOPs per GPU, and new software architectures have recently become available to ease the transition from graphics based to scientific applications. This allows for a cheap alternative to standard supercomputing methods and should increase the time to discovery. 3-D particle tracking and MHD codes have been developed using NVIDIA's CUDA and have demonstrated speed up of nearly a factor of 20 over equivalent CPU versions of the codes. Such a speed up enables new applications to develop, including real time running of radiation belt simulations and real time running of global magnetospheric simulations, both of which could provide important space weather prediction tools.