  There exists an increasing interest for using immersed boundary methods
(IBMs) (Peskin 2000) to model moving objects in computational fluid dynamics.
Indeed, this approach is particularly efficient, because the fluid mesh does
not require to be body-fitted or to adjust dynamically to the motion of the
body. Frequently, IBMs are implemented in combination with the lattice
Boltzmann methods (LBM) (Kr\"uger 2016). They fit elegantly into the framework
of this method, and yield impressive parallel performances. It has also become
quite common to accelerate LBM simulations with the use of Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs) (T\"olke 2010), as the underlying algorithm adjusts naturally to
the architecture of such platforms. It is not uncommon that speedups of an
order of magnitude, or more, at equal financial cost or energy consumption are
observed, as compared to classical CPUs. IBM algorithms are however more
difficult to adapt to GPUs, because their complex memory access pattern
conflicts with a GPU's strategy of broadcasting data to a large number of GPU
cores in single memory accesses. In the existing literature, GPU
implementations of LBM-IBM codes are therefore restricted to situations in
which the immersed surfaces are very small compared to the total number of
fluid cells (Valero-Lara 2014), as is often the case in exterior flow
simulations around an obstacle. This assumption is however not valid in many
other cases of interest.
  We propose a new method for the implementation of a LBM-IBM on GPUs in the
CUDA language, which allows to handle a substantially larger immersed surfaces
with acceptable performance than previous implementations.

Computational Physics;Performance