FluidX3D - Simulating Rayleigh-Bénard Convection in Real Time and 3D on a GPU

Rayleigh-Bénard convection occurs for example in a hot pan filled with oil or in the Earths mantle, whenever a vertical temperature gradient is present and the parameters like viscosity, thermal conductivity and the thermal expansion coefficient are just right. At the bottom the fluid is heated, expands, becomes less dense and thus rises. When it reaches the cold top plate, it becomes more dense again and sinks to the bottom. In 3D this results in convection cells. Performing such 3D simulations in real time has not been possible before the rise of GPUs. Traditional LBM codes running on CPUs are approximately 100x slower - far away from real time. FluidX3D is a real time 3D fluid simulation based using the lattice Boltzmann method. It is written in OpenCL C (GPU code) and optimized to the physical limit (video memory bandwith, ~520GB/s). All demonstrations but the last one are simulated and visualized in real time on a Nvidia Titan Xp. Graphics are done with the OpenCL C version of Line3D, the fastest graph