City Research Online

Abstract

We propose a numerical approach based on the Lattice-Boltzmann (LBM) and Immersed Boundary (IB) methods to tackle the problem of the interaction of solids with an incompressible fluid flow, and its implementation on heterogeneous platforms based on data-parallel accelerators such as NVIDIA GPUs and the Intel Xeon Phi. We explain in detail the parallelization of these methods and describe a number of optimizations, mainly focusing on improving memory management and reducing the cost of host-accelerator communication. As previous research has consistently shown, pure LBM simulations are able to achieve good performance results on heterogeneous systems thanks to the high parallel efficiency of this method. Unfortunately, when coupling LBM and IB methods, the overheads of IB degrade the overall performance. As an alternative, we have explored different hybrid implementations that effectively hide such overheads and allow us to exploit both the multi-core and the hardware accelerator in a cooperative way, with excellent performance results.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2015, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publisher Keywords:	Parallel computing; Computational fluid dynamics; Fluid–solid interaction; Lattice-Boltzmann method; Immersed-Boundary method; Heterogeneous computing
Subjects:	T Technology > TL Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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