High-performance implementations and large-scale validation of the link-wise artificial compressibility method

The link-wise artificial compressibility method (LW-ACM) is a recent formulation of the artificial compressibility method for solving the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Two implementations of the LW-ACM in three dimensions on CUDA enabled GPUs are described. The first one is a modified version of a state-of-the-art CUDA implementation of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), showing that an existing GPU LBM solver might easily be adapted to LW-ACM. The second one follows a novel approach, which leads to a performance increase of up to 1.8× compared to the LBM implementation considered here, while reducing the memory requirements by a factor of 5.25. Large-scale simulations of the lid-driven cubic cavity at Reynolds number Re=2000 were performed for both LW-ACM and LBM. Comparison of the simulation results against spectral elements reference data shows that LW-ACM performs almost as well as multiple-relaxation-time LBM in terms of accuracy.