Parallel performance and accuracy of lattice Boltzmann and traditional finite difference methods for solving the unsteady two-dimensional Burger's equation

Lattice Boltzmann methods are gaining recognition in the field of computational fluid dynamics due to their computational efficiency. In order to quantify the computational efficiency and accuracy of the lattice Boltzmann method, it is compared with efficient traditional finite difference methods such as the alternating direction implicit scheme. The lattice Boltzmann algorithm implemented in previous studies does not approach peak performance for simulations where the data involved in computation per time step is more than the cache size. Due to this, data is obtained from the main memory and this access is much slower than access to cache memory. Using a cache-optimized lattice Boltzmann algorithm, this paper takes into account the full computational strength of the lattice Boltzmann method. The coin parison is performed on both a single processor and multiple processors. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.