---
title: "Lattice Boltzmann Method"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Lattice Boltzmann Method"
aliases: ["LBM","Lattice Boltzmann"]
first_seen: "2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Microcosmos (artificial-life engine)","computational fluid dynamics","GPU simulation","differentiable physics"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


A computational fluid-dynamics technique that simulates fluid flow through
local collision-and-streaming updates on a discrete lattice of particle
distributions, rather than directly solving the Navier-Stokes equations —
widely used in engineering CFD since the 1990s for its locality and
parallelizability.

Matters to this vault as the fluid solver (specifically the D2Q9 lattice
variant) underlying Microcosmos's engine: because every update is local, the
method scales linearly rather than quadratically with particle count, which
is the mechanism behind the engine's ~500k-particle GPU benchmark.

## References
- [[claim-microcosmos-elastic-filaments-differentiable-gpu-fluid]]
- [[claim-microcosmos-linear-scaling-avoids-quadratic-gpu-populations]]
- Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-microcosmos-gpu-alife, 2026-08-20-do-microcosmoss-scaling-benchmark-linear-to-500k-particles