Reducing memory requirements for large size LBM simulations on GPUs

The scientific community in its never-ending road of larger and more efficient computational resources is in need of more efficient implementations that can adapt efficiently on the current parallel platforms. Graphics processing units are an appropriate platform that cover some of these demands. This architecture presents a high performance with a reduced cost and an efficient power consumption. However, the memory capacity in these devices is reduced and so expensive memory transfers are necessary to deal with big problems. Today, the lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) has positioned as an efficient approach for Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations. Despite this method is particularly amenable to be efficiently parallelized, it is in need of a considerable memory capacity, which is the consequence of a dramatic fall in performance when dealing with large simulations. In this work, we propose some initiatives to minimize such demand of memory, which allows us to execute bigger simulations on the same platform without additional memory transfers, keeping a high performance. In particular, we present 2 new implementations, LBM-Ghost and LBM-Swap, which are deeply analyzed, presenting the pros and cons of each of them.This project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO): BCAM Severo Ochoa accreditation SEV-2013-0323, MTM2013-40824, Computación de Altas Prestaciones VII TIN2015-65316-P, by the Basque Excellence Research Center (BERC 2014-2017) pro- gram by the Basque Government, and by the Departament d' Innovació, Universitats i Empresa de la Generalitat de Catalunya, under project MPEXPAR: Models de Programació i Entorns d' Execució Paral·lels (2014-SGR-1051). We also thank the support of the computing facilities of Extremadura Research Centre for Advanced Technologies (CETA-CIEMAT) and NVIDIA GPU Research Center program for the provided resources, as well as the support of NVIDIA through the BSC/UPC NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft