SunwayLB: Enabling Extreme-Scale Lattice Boltzmann Method Based Computing Fluid Dynamics Simulations on Sunway TaihuLight

Abstract

The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is a relatively new class of Computational Fluid Dynamics methods. In this paper, we report our work on SunwayLB, which enables LBM based solutions aiming for industrial applications. We propose several techniques to boost the simulation speed and improve the scalability of SunwayLB, including a customized multi-level domain decomposition and data sharing scheme, a carefully orchestrated strategy to fuse kernels with different performance constraints for a more balanced workload, and optimization strategies for assembly code, which bring up to 137x speedup. Based on these optimization schemes, we manage to perform the largest direct numerical simulation which involves up to 5.6 trillion lattice cells, achieving 11,245 billion cell updates per second (GLUPS), 77% memory bandwidth utilization and a sustained performance of 4.7 PFlops. We also demonstrate a series of computational experiments for extreme-large scale fluid flow, as examples of real-world applications, to check the validity and performance of our work. The results show that SunwayLB is competent for a practical solution for industrial applications.