High Speed Computation of Lattice Gas Automata with FPGA

Abstract

Lattice gas automata are a class of cellular automata, and are used for simulating fluid dynamics. In the cellular automata, a single update rule is applied simultaneously to each cell on the lattice. Therefore, many approaches with parallel systems have been researched.

In this paper, we propose a computation method of cellular automata for small systems with limited memory bandwidth. We implemented the method on a FPGA board (ADC RC1000 with one Virtex XCV1000). The speed gain for a lattice gas FHP-III model with 2048 × 1024 lattice is 143 times compared with Pentium-III 700MHz.