Physically based visual simulation of the Lattice Boltzmann method on the GPU: a survey

Abstract

The rapid increase in performance, programmability, and availability of graphics processing units (GPUs) has made them a compelling platform for computationally demanding tasks in a wide variety of application domains. One of these is real-time computational fluid dynamics, which are computationally expensive due to a large number of grid points that require calculations. One commonly used tool to simulate fluid flows is the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), mainly due to its simpler formulation when compared to solving the Navier---Stokes equations, and because of its scalability on parallel processing systems. In this paper, we give an up-to-date survey on the research regarding the LBM for fluid simulation using GPUs. We discuss how the method was implemented with different GPU architectures and software frameworks, focusing on optimization techniques and their performance. Additionally, we mention some applications of the method in different areas of study.