Accelerating radiative heat transfer calculations on modern hardware

Widely used for the resolution of radiative heat transfer calculations, the radiosity method entails the use of view factors which may require significant calculation efforts in complex geometries. In this work, we study the heat transfer of the filament of an incandescent light bulb using the radiosity method. Due to the high computational cost of the Monte Carlo method used for computing the view factors, two high-performance computing (HPC) techniques, namely, a parallel multi-core approach based on OpenMP and a massively parallel implementation over two different graphics processing units (GPUs) in CUDA were study. The use of such techniques enabled to reduce the calculation time up to 10× in two Quad Core INTEL Xeon processors, 112× in an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU and 199× in an NVIDIA Tesla C2070.