Compressible lattice Boltzmann simulations on high-performance and low-cost GeForce GPU

The feasibility of compressible lattice Boltzmann simulations on high-performance and low-cost NVIDIA GeForce GPU is studied to enhance computational efficiency of compressible lattice Boltzmann by using much cheaper computing hardware. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, which has similar single precision operation computing performance with NVIDIA scientific computational Tesla K80 GPU and much lower price (seven to ten times) than the latter, is used in this work. The problem of GeForce GPUs is with low double precision operation performance and lack of error-correcting code memory, which will influence the accuracy of compressible lattice Boltzmann simulations. To evaluate its feasibility, the double-distribution-function lattice Boltzmann method is adopted for compressible fluid flows. Three typical compressible problems are tested, ie, the Riemann problem, the regular shock reflection problem, and the supersonic boundary layer problem. The results by GeForce GPU with single precision operation have numerical fluctuations in the simulations with shock waves. Moreover, GeForce GPUs have similar numerical accuracy with CPUs in the regular shock reflection problem and supersonic boundary layer problem.