Geomechanica’s Irazu software was originally developed on the OpenCL heterogeneous computing platform, which allows execution on a wide variety of computer hardware, including AMD GPUs and Intel/AMD CPUs. However, execution on NVIDIA GPUs had major issues and was practically impossible. In addition, the computational engine of Irazu was only available on Linux operating systems (OS). Even though Linux is the OS of choice for serious numerical computation, many of our users lacked familiarity with the OS, which generally resulted in a steeper learning curve. 

We are thrilled to announce that both of these limitations have been now overcome thanks to two major new developments of our Irazu software. We have implemented Irazu on NVIDIA‘s CUDA platform, which would allow execution of Irazu on NVIDIA GPUs. This development offers more flexibility in the GPU choice and access to more cloud-based computing infrastructure. In addition, we have extended the CUDA version of Irazu to support Microsoft Windows operating system. This development facilitates onboarding and learning the software for new users that are not familiar with Linux. 

A comparison of performance on AMD and NVidia GPUs is shown in the figure below.

Please get in touch with us if you’re interested in trying Irazu out on an NVIDIA GPU and MS Windows.