Heterogeneous System-on-Chip-Based Lattice-Boltzmann Visual Simulation System

Cerebral aneurysm is a cerebrovascular disorder caused by a weakness in the wall of an artery or vein, which causes a localized dilation or ballooning of the blood vessel. It is life-threatening; hence, an early and accurate diagnosis would be a great aid to medical professionals in making the correct choice of treatment. HemeLB is a massively parallel Lattice-Boltzmann simulation software, which is designed to provide the radiologist with estimates of flow rates, pressures, and shear stresses throughout the relevant vascular structures, intended to eventually permit greater precision in the choice of therapeutic intervention. However, in order to allow surgeries and doctors to view and visualize the results in real-time at medical environments, a cost-efficient, practical platform is needed. In this article, we have developed and evaluated a version of HemeLB on various heterogeneous system-on-chip platforms, allowing users to run HemeLB on a low-cost embedded platform and to visualize the simulation results in real-time. A comprehensive evaluation of implementation on the Zynq SoC and Jetson TX1 embedded graphic processing unit platforms are reported. The achieved results show that the proposed Jetson TX1 implementation outperforms the Zynq implementation by a factor of 19 in terms of site updates per second