Lattice Boltzmann method for two-dimensional shallow water equations with CUDA

Abstract

This paper presents the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for two dimensional shallow water equations to simulate dam break problem. We implemented sequential code and compared it with the exact solution. Then, we implemented three parallel programs with the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The first parallel version is a straightforward implementation. The second parallel version reduces the calculations of distribution function in the LBM. The third parallel program has fixed the branch divergence problem with branch distribution. Speed up for the third parallel program is increased approximately 2.1x from the first parallel program, and it is increased approximately 22.7x from the sequential program version.