GPU-Based Flow Simulation with Complex Boundaries

We present a physically-based flow simulation which supports complex boundary conditions running on the graphics processing unit (GPU). We employ the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), a relatively new discrete-space discrete-time method, for computing the flow field. To handle complex, moving and deformable boundaries, we propose a generic voxelization algorithm of the boundaries using depth peeling, and extend it to a dynamic boundary generation method that converts any geometric boundary to LBM boundary nodes on-the-fly. Our implementation incorporates various optimizations to fully exploit the computation power of the GPU. As a result, the GPU-based simulation can be an order of magnitude faster than the CPU version, while generating simulation results with the same accuracy.