GPU accelerated lattice Boltzmann model for shallow water flow and mass transport

A lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for solving the shallow water equations (SWEs) and the advection-dispersion equation is developed and implemented on graphics processing unit (GPU)-based architectures. A generalized lattice Boltzmann equation (GLBE) with a multiple-relaxation-time (MRT) collision method is used to simulate shallow water flow. A two-relaxation-time (TRT) method with two speed-of-sound techniques is used to solve the advection-dispersion equation. The proposed LBM is implemented to an NVIDIA (R) Computing Processor in a single GPU workstation. GPU computing is performed using the Jacket GPU engine for MATLAB (R) and CUDA. In the numerical examples, the MRT-LBM model and the TRT-LBM model are verified and show excellent agreement to exact solutions. The MRT outperforms the single-relaxation-time (SRT) collision operator in terms of stability and accuracy when the SRT parameter is close to the stability limit of 0.5. Mass transport with velocity-dependent dispersion in shallow water flow is simulated by combining the MRT-LBM model and the TRT-LBM model. GPU performance with CUDA code shows an order of magnitude higher than MATLAB-Jacket code. Moreover, the GPU parallel performance increases as the grid size increases. The results indicate the promise of the GPU-accelerated LBM for modeling mass transport phenomena in shallow water flows. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.