Implementing lattice Boltzmann computation on graphics hardware

The Lattice Boltzman Model (LBM) is a physically-based approach that simulates the microscopic movement of fluid particles by simple, identical, and local rules. We accelerate the computation of the LBM on general-purpose graphics hardware, by grouping particle packets into 2D textures and mapping the Boltzmann equations completely to the rasterization and frame buffer operations. We apply stitching and packing to further improve the performance. In addition, we propose techniques, namely range scaling and range separation, that systematically transform variables into the range required by the graphics hardware and thus prevent overflow. Our approach can be extended to acceleration of the computation of any cellular automata model.