Performance analysis of single-phase, multiphase, and multicomponent lattice-Boltzmann fluid flow simulations on GPU clusters

The lattice-Boltzmann method is well suited for implementation in single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) environments provided by general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). This paper discusses the integration of these GPGPU programs with OpenMP to create lattice-Boltzmann applications for multiGPU clusters. In addition to the standard single-phase single-component lattice-Boltzmann method, the performances of more complex multiphase, multicomponent models are also examined. The contributions of various GPU lattice-Boltzmann parameters to the performance are examined and quantified with a statistical model of the performance using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). By examining singleand multi-GPU lattice-Boltzmann simulations with ANOVA, we show that all the lattice-Boltzmann simulations primarily depend on effects corresponding to simulation geometry and decomposition, and not on the architectural aspects of GPU. Additionally, using ANOVA we confirm that the metrics of Efficiency and Utilization are not suitable for memory-bandwidth-dependent codes. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.