On the Use of a Many-core Processor for Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations

The increased availability of modern embedded many-core architectures supporting floating-point operations in hardware makes them interesting targets in traditional high performance computing areas as well. In this paper, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) from the domain of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is evaluated on Adapteva’s Epiphany many-core architecture. Although the LBM implementation shows very good scalability and high floating-point efficiency in the lattice computations, current Epiphany hardware does not provide adequate amounts of either local memory or external memory bandwidth to provide a good foundation for simulation of the large problems commonly encountered in real CFD applications.This work was supported by the ESCHER project funded by the Swedish Knowledge foundation, and Volvo Penta AB, Gothenburg, SwedenESCHE