We investigate the performance of the HemeLB lattice-Boltzmann simulator for
cerebrovascular blood flow, aimed at providing timely and clinically relevant
assistance to neurosurgeons. HemeLB is optimised for sparse geometries,
supports interactive use, and scales well to 32,768 cores for problems with ~81
million lattice sites. We obtain a maximum performance of 29.5 billion site
updates per second, with only an 11% slowdown for highly sparse problems (5%
fluid fraction). We present steering and visualisation performance measurements
and provide a model which allows users to predict the performance, thereby
determining how to run simulations with maximum accuracy within time
constraints.Comment: Accepted by the Journal of Computational Science. 33 pages, 16
figures, 7 table