An investigation of the performance of the colored Gauss-Seidel solver on CPU and GPU

The performance of the colored Gauss-Seidel solver on CPU and GPU was investigated for the two- and three-dimensional heat conduction problems by using different mesh sizes. The heat conduction equation was discretized by the finite difference method and finite element method. The CPU yielded good performance for small problems but deteriorated when the total memory required for computing was larger than the cache memory for large problems. In contrast, the GPU performed better as the mesh size increased because of the latency hiding technique. Further, GPU computation by the colored Gauss-Siedel solver was approximately 7 times that by the single CPU. Furthermore, the colored Gauss-Seidel solver was found to be approximately twice that of the Jacobi solver when parallel computing was conducted on the GPU.