Parallel simulation of particle suspensions with the lattice Boltzmann method

A description of the steps taken to produce a massively parallel code for particle suspension problems using the lattice Boltzmann method is presented. A number of benchmarks based on a binary fluid lattice Boltzmann model are used to assess the performance of the code in terms of the computational overhead required for the particle problem compared with the fluid-only problem, and for the scaling of the code to large processor numbers. On the Blue Gene/L architecture, the additional computational cost of particle suspensions of up to 40% solid volume fraction (here over a million particles) is negligible compared with the fluid-only code.