Abstract:

We present an efficient method for the simulation of laminar fluid flows with free surfaces including their interaction with moving rigid bodies, based on the two-dimensional shallow water equations and the Lattice-Boltzmann method. Our implementation targets multiple fundamentally different architectures such as commodity multicore CPUs with SSE, GPUs, the Cell BE and clusters. We show that our code scales well on an MPI-based cluster; that an eightfold speedup can be achieved using modern GPUs in contrast to multithreaded CPU code and, finally, that it is possible to solve fluid-structure interaction scenarios with high resolution at interactive rates.

(Markus Geveler, Dirk Ribbrock, Dominik Göddeke and Stefan Turek: “Lattice-Boltzmann Simulation of the Shallow-Water Equations with Fluid-Structure Interaction on Multi- and Manycore Processors”, Accepted in: Facing the Multicore Challenge, Heidelberg, Germany, Mar. 2010. Link.)

Abstract:

We present HONEI, an open-source collection of libraries offering a hardware oriented approach to numerical calculations. HONEI abstracts the hardware, and applications written on top of HONEI can be executed on a wide range of computer architectures such as CPUs, GPUs and the Cell processor. We demonstrate the flexibility and performance of our approach with two test applications, a Finite Element multigrid solver for the Poisson problem and a robust and fast simulation of shallow water waves. By linking against HONEI’s libraries, we achieve a two-fold speedup over straight forward C++ code using HONEI’s SSE backend, and additional 3–4 and 4–16 times faster execution on the Cell and a GPU. A second important aspect of our approach is that the full performance capabilities of the hardware under consideration can be exploited by adding optimised application-specific operations to the HONEI libraries. HONEI provides all necessary infrastructure for development and evaluation of such kernels, significantly simplifying their development.

(Danny van Dyk, Markus Geveler, Sven Mallach, Dirk Ribbrock, Dominik Göddeke and Carsten Gutwenger: HONEI: A collection of libraries for numerical computations targeting multiple processor architectures. Computer Physics Communications 180(12), pp. 2534-2543, December 2009. DOI 10.1016/j.cpc.2009.04.018)

The 2009 SPEEDUP workshop will focus on Multicore computing and Parallel Languages. Topics include, but are not limited to OpenCL, NVIDIA CUDA, the Cell processor and GPU Computing. The event will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 7 and 8, 2009. The second day features a tutorial on GPU Computing with NVIDIA CUDA, organized by Dominik Göddeke (TU Dortmund), Robert Strzodka (Max Planck Institute Informatik) and Christian Sigg (NVIDIA).