Parallel lattice Boltzmann methods for CFD applications

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has evolved to a promising alternative to the well-established methods based on finite elements/volumes for computational fluid dynamics simulations. Ease of implementation, extensibility, and computational efficiency are the major reasons for LBM's growing field of application and increasing popularity. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the involved theory and equations for LBM, present various techniques to increase the single-CPU performance, outline the parallelization of a standard LBM implementation, and show performance results. In order to demonstrate the straightforward extensibility of LBM, we then focus on an application in material science involving fluid flows with free surfaces. We discuss the required extensions to handle this complex scenario, and the impact on the parallelization technique.