Tutorial: Interactive Lattice-Based Flow Simulation and Visualization

Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Organizer:

                 Ye Zhao, Kent State University, Email: zhao@cs.kent.edu

             Arie Kaufman, Stony Brook University, Email: ari@cs.stonybrook.edu

             Klaus Mueller, Stony Brook University, Email: mueller@cs.stonybrook.edu

             Nils Thuery, ETH Zurich, Email: thuereyn@ inf.ethz.ch

             Ulrich Ruede, University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Email: ruede@informatik.uni-erlangen.de

             Klaus Iglberger, University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Email: klaus@informatik.uni-erlangen.de

Abstract

The advances in applying physical models and numerical PDE (Partial Differential Equation) solvers for flow simulation, along with the rapid increase in computer power, open a new era in a variety of fields and application domains in computer graphics and visualization. As a unique explicit, simple and inherently-parallel scheme, the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has developed into a promising numerical method for simulating fluid flows and modeling physics in fluids. It has achieved great success in the world of computational physics both from the analytical and practical points of view. The LBM scheme excels due to its very efficient and simple computing process for modeling fluid dynamics even in the presence of very complex boundary conditions, such as arbitrarily-shaped obstacles, moving objects, free surfaces and the like. Due to its discrete nature, the LBM lends itself well to efficient interface tracking as to adaptive and multi-resolution approaches, which are both critical for flow simulations in realistic graphics applications. Moreover, its computational pattern, which is similar to cellular automata, is easily parallelizable. This makes the LBM very amenable to acceleration on parallel computers, such as single GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) and for GPU clusters, enabling it to achieve interactive or real-time flow simulation performance in a scalable fashion.

Due to these many merits, the LBM continues to gain momentum and adoption within the computer graphics and visualization community for the modeling of various fluid phenomena. But despite these positive trends, the power of this parallel lattice-based scheme has still not been fully utilized, and we feel that this is mostly due to the lack of proper education activities in the underlying principles of the method. Fortunately, unlike other simulation methods in computational physics, the ease of use and acceleration of LBM, and especially its well-known gentle learning curve, make it relatively easy for users to become proficient. The authors of this tutorial have a long history in applying the LBM for the modeling of a wide variety of flow phenomena. Since the year 2001, these works have lead to numerous research papers, presentations and collaborative outreaching projects. We found this period a very enjoyable one and we are extremely optimistic for these successes to persist in the near and far future. In this course, we hope to share this enthusiasm with the audience who are interested in interactive and real-time flow simulation and visualization. We are aiming to educate attendees in the proficient use of the LBM in various application domains: for the development of computer graphics and games, for prediction simulation capabilities, and for general computational science and engineering.

 

Contents

1. Lattice Boltzmann method fundamentals

2. Efficient implementation and parallelization

3. Lattice-based flow simulation Applications

4. Free surface and interface tracking

5. Adaptive and multi-resolution simulation

 

Download

                 Please click to download the full tutorial (this is the newest updated version)

           You might also download the movies.(this includes most movies, others can be found at the website of Nils Thuerey)