Zynq SoC based acceleration of the lattice Boltzmann method

Cerebral aneurysm is a life‐threatening condition. It is a weakness in a blood vessel that may enlarge and bleed into the surrounding area. In order to understand the surrounding environmental conditions during the interventions or surgical procedures, a simulation of blood flow in cerebral arteries is needed. One of the effective simulation approaches is to use the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method. Due to the computational complexity of the algorithm, the simulation is usually performed on high performance computers. In this paper, efficient hardware architectures of the LB method on a Zynq system‐on‐chip (SoC) are designed and implemented. The proposed architectures have first been simulated in Vivado HLS environment and later implemented on a ZedBoard using the software‐defined SoC (SDSoC) development environment. In addition, a set of evaluations of different hardware architectures of the LB implementation is discussed in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed implementation is able to accelerate the processing speed by a factor of 52 compared to a dual‐core ARM processor‐based software implementation.