Lattice Boltzmann Simulations at Petascale on Multi-GPU Systems with Asynchronous Data Transfer and Strictly Enforced Memory Read Alignment

Abstract

The lattice Boltzmann method is a well-established numerical approach for complex fluid flow simulations. Recently general-purpose graphics processing units have become accessible as high-performance computing resources at large-scale. We report on implementing a lattice Boltzmann solver for multi-GPU systems that achieves 0.69 PFLOPS performance on 16384 GPUs. In addition to optimizing the data layout on the GPUs and eliminating the halo sites, we make use of the possibility to overlap data transfer between the host CPU and the device GPU with computing on the GPU. We simulate flow in porous media and measure both strong and weak scaling performance with the emphasis being on a large scale simulation using realistic input data.