Applying Modern Soft- and Hardware Technologies for Computational Steering Approaches in Computational Fluid Dynamics

In this article we present an educational simulation tool, FlowSim 2007 CUDA edition, a computational steering application for interactive 2D flow simulation based on the Lattice Boltzmann Method. The application combines a comfortable user interface as well as a convenient development platform on the one hand and a high performance flow solver on the other hand. The user interface is implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework whereas the Lattice Boltzmann kernel is based on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) by nVIDIA running on GeForce 8 series featuring G8X GPUs [2]. The gap between the managed intermediate language (IL) code and the hardware specific native code is filled using the recently introduced C++/CLI programming language [1]. We demonstrate that this integrated desktop approach can deliver a performance that exceeds that of a high end PC by at least an order of magnitude. In our conclusion we will focus on extensions to three dimensions and clusters of GPUs.