Fluid Flow at LSU

A lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) on high performance computing (HPC) environments for three-dimensional shallow water flow fields coupled to mass transport is developed. Recently, the LBM has become an attractive numerical method to solve various fluid dynamics phenomena. However, LBM has not been extensively applied to shallow water equations. Shallow water equations have wide applications in ocean and hydraulic engineering which can benefit from the advantages of the LBM. The standard LBM for two dimensional shallow water flows is extended to three dimensional flows by solving the multilayer shallow water equations. LBM is an attractive method for solving the multilayered shallow water equations because the extension to multilayer is straight forward and all simplicities and advantages of the LBM in mass transport in shallow water flows and the LBM performance on central processing unit (CPU)-based and graphics processing unit (GPU)-based HPC environments.

Authors: Kevin R. Tubbs, Frank T-C. Tsai, Christopher White, and Gabrielle Allen at Louisiana State University
Speedup: 10X
System Specs: NVIDIA Tesla 8-Series GPU, and an Intel 3.33 GHz Quad Core CPU

Demonstration of the Lattice Boltzmann Method

Jacket Results with an NVIDIA Tesla 8-Series GT GPU

JACKET RESULTS

• (a) Average time per step on the graphics card versus a single core on a 3.33Ghz Quad Core CPU
• (b) Additional speed improvements with increasing problem size.
• (c) As much as 4x performance difference with Jacket on growing grid size