Simulation of turbulent flow by lattice Boltzmann method and conventional method on a GPU

In this study, the lattice Boltzmann method, pseudospectral method, and artificial compressibility method were implemented on both CPU and GPU machines. Homogeneous isotropic turbulent flows were calculated using these three methods with the C language and CUDA library. The computational results show that the flow field obtained by the lattice Boltzmann method was almost the same as that obtained by the pseudospectral method. Among these three methods, the computational time of the lattice Boltzmann method on a GPU was the shortest of all calculations. Thus, the lattice Boltzmann method was well accelerated by CPUs. These results proved that the lattice Boltzmann method on a GPU has advantages of accuracy and computational speed. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.