IB-Flows: an open-source multi-GPU immersed boundary code for fluid-structure interaction
Abstract
We present IB-Flows, an open-source, multi-GPU solver for the direct numerical simulation of incompressible fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. The code couples a second-order finite-difference fractional-step Navier-Stokes solver on a staggered Cartesian grid with two immersed boundary methods: a Lagrangian method based on moving least-squares (MLS) interpolation and an Eulerian sharp-interface method. Rigid bodies are advanced with a quaternion-based Newton-Euler solver, while deformable surfaces embedded in three-dimensional flows are described by a structural solver based on the interaction potentials; a predictor-corrector scheme provides either loose or strong fluid-structure coupling. Non-Newtonian fluids with shear-thinning or shear-thickening rheology are handled through a strain-rate-dependent viscosity, and the same framework accommodates subgrid-scale eddy-viscosity models for large-eddy simulations of turbulent flows. The solver is written in CUDA Fortran with MPI domain decomposition, so that the fluid, interpolation and structural kernels are all executed on the GPUs, while the distributed transposes required by the Poisson and implicit solvers are further accelerated by the cuDecomp library through GPU-aware communication. Strong- and weak-scaling tests show near-ideal intra-node scaling and good multi-node efficiency. The solver is validated against a set of benchmark problems spanning wall-bounded turbulence, rigid-body and deformable-body fluid-structure interaction, and a biomedical application. IB-Flows is intended as a reproducible reference implementation for immersed boundary FSI simulations on modern GPU clusters and as a transparent platform to be used for tackling multiphysics problems.
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BibTeX
@misc{vagnoli2026ibflows,
title = {{IB-Flows: an open-source multi-GPU immersed boundary code for fluid-structure interaction}},
author = {Giovanni Vagnoli and Martino Andrea Scarpolini and Fabio Guglietta and Joshua Romero and Massimiliano Fatica and Roberto Verzicco and Francesco Viola},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.19130},
eprint = {2609.19130},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19130},
note = {CC BY-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - IB-Flows: an open-source multi-GPU immersed boundary code for fluid-structure interaction
AU - Giovanni Vagnoli
AU - Martino Andrea Scarpolini
AU - Fabio Guglietta
AU - Joshua Romero
AU - Massimiliano Fatica
AU - Roberto Verzicco
AU - Francesco Viola
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/17
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.19130
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19130
AB - We present IB-Flows, an open-source, multi-GPU solver for the direct numerical simulation of incompressible fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. The code couples a second-order finite-difference fractional-step Navier-Stokes solver on a staggered Cartesian grid with two immersed boundary methods: a Lagrangian method based on moving least-squares (MLS) interpolation and an Eulerian sharp-interface method. Rigid bodies are advanced with a quaternion-based Newton-Euler solver, while deformable surfaces embedded in three-dimensional flows are described by a structural solver based on the interaction potentials; a predictor-corrector scheme provides either loose or strong fluid-structure coupling. Non-Newtonian fluids with shear-thinning or shear-thickening rheology are handled through a strain-rate-dependent viscosity, and the same framework accommodates subgrid-scale eddy-viscosity models for large-eddy simulations of turbulent flows. The solver is written in CUDA Fortran with MPI domain decomposition, so that the fluid, interpolation and structural kernels are all executed on the GPUs, while the distributed transposes required by the Poisson and implicit solvers are further accelerated by the cuDecomp library through GPU-aware communication. Strong- and weak-scaling tests show near-ideal intra-node scaling and good multi-node efficiency. The solver is validated against a set of benchmark problems spanning wall-bounded turbulence, rigid-body and deformable-body fluid-structure interaction, and a biomedical application. IB-Flows is intended as a reproducible reference implementation for immersed boundary FSI simulations on modern GPU clusters and as a transparent platform to be used for tackling multiphysics problems.
ER -