The TheLMA project: Multi-GPU implementation of the lattice Boltzmann method

In this paper, we describe the implementation of a multi-GPU fluid flow solver based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The LBM is a novel approach in computational fluid dynamics, with numerous interesting features from a computational, numerical, and physical standpoint. Our program is based on CUDA and uses POSIX threads to manage multiple computation devices. Using recently released hardware, our solver may therefore run eight GPUs in parallel, which allows to perform simulations at a rather large scale. Performance and scalability are excellent, the speedup over sequential implementations being at least of two orders of magnitude. In addition, we discuss tiling and communication issues for present and forthcoming implementations.