Zynq SoC based Lattice-Boltzmann Simulation Environment

Abstract

Cerebral aneurysm is a life-threatening disease that may enlarge and bleed into surrounding area. Therefore, diagnosis of aneurysm is highly important as early as possible to help doctors to decide the right treatment. The HemeLB is a lattice-Boltzmann simulation framework that allows surgeons to view the simulation results of cerebral blood vessels. The HemeLB simulation framework was designed for high performance computer (HPC), which is not user friendly for the users who do not have computer science background. In this paper, we present a solution for designing and implementing HemeLB on a cost efficient embedded platform, in order to allow the HemeLB simulation framework to be potentially implemented in the local environment of hospital. The proposed work has been developed using a Zynq system-on-chip (SoC), which is a heterogeneous multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) platform widely used in high performance embedded applications. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation for the implementation is also reported in this paper. The results demonstrate that the proposed implementation is able to support the HemeLB framework on a low-cost MPSoC platform and achieving a maximum performance of 215,751 sites updates per second with only 2 cores.