Parallel lattice boltzmann flow simulation on emerging multi-core platforms

Abstract

A parallel Lattice Boltzmann Method (pLBM), which is based on hierarchical spatial decomposition, is designed to perform large-scale flow simulations. The algorithm uses critical section-free, dual representation in order to expose maximal concurrency and data locality. Performances of emerging multi-core platforms-PlayStation3 (Cell Broadband Engine) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)-are tested using the pLBM, which is implemented with multi-thread and message-passing programming. The results show that pLBM achieves good performance improvement, 11.02 for Cell over a traditional Xeon cluster and 8.76 for CUDA graphics processing unit (GPU) over a Sempron central processing unit (CPU). The results provide some insights into application design on future many-core platforms. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.