Heterogeneous System-on-Chip based Lattice-Boltzmann Visual Simulation System

Cerebral aneurysm is a cerebrovascular disorder caused by a weakness in the wall of an artery or vein, that causes a localised dilation or ballooning of the blood vessel. It is life-threatening, hence an early and accurate diagnosis would be a great aid to medical professionals in making the correct choice of treatment. HemeLB is a massively parallel lattice-Boltzmann simulation software which is designed to provide the radiologist with estimates of flow rates, pressures and shear stresses throughout the relevant vascular structures, intended to eventually permit greater precision in the choice of therapeutic intervention. However, in order to allow surgeries and doctors to view and visualise the results in real-time at medical environments, a cost-efficient, practical platform is needed. In this paper, we have developed and evaluated a version of HemeLB on various heterogeneous system-on-chip platforms, allowing users to run HemeLB on a low cost embedded platform and to visualise the simulation results in real-time. A comprehensive evaluation of implementation on the Zynq SoC and Jetson TX1 embedded graphic processing unit platforms are reported. The achieved results show that the proposed Jetson TX1 implementation outperforms the Zynq implementation by a factor of 19 in terms of site updates per second.