Paper detail

Multi-GPU Acceleration of PALABOS Fluid Solver using C++ Standard Parallelism

This article presents the principles, software architecture, and performance analysis of the GPU port of the lattice Boltzmann software library Palabos (J. Latt et al., "Palabos: Parallel lattice Boltzmann solver", Comput. Math. Appl. 81, 334-350, (2021)). A hybrid CPU-GPU execution model is adopted, in which numerical components are selectively assigned to either the CPU or the GPU, depending on considerations of performance or convenience. This design enables a progressive porting strategy, allowing most features of the original CPU-based codebase to be gradually and seamlessly adapted to GPU execution. The new architecture builds upon two complementary paradigms: a classical object-oriented structure for CPU execution, and a data-oriented counterpart for GPUs, which reproduces the modularity of the original code while eliminating object-oriented overhead detrimental to GPU performance. Central to this approach is the use of modern C++, including standard parallel algorithms and template metaprogramming techniques, which permit the generation of hardware-agnostic computational kernels. This facilitates the development of user-defined, GPU-accelerated components such as collision operators or boundary conditions, while preserving compatibility with the existing codebase and avoiding the need for external libraries or non-standard language extensions. The correctness and performance of the GPU-enabled Palabos are demonstrated through a series of three-dimensional multiphysics benchmarks, including the laminar-turbulent transition in a Taylor-Green vortex, lid-driven cavity flow, and pore-scale flow in Berea sandstone. Despite the high-level abstraction of the implementation, the single-GPU performance is similar to CUDA-native solvers, and multi-GPU tests exhibit good weak and strong scaling across all test cases.