High-Order Methods for Scalable Simulation of Turbulence

Paul Fisher
Argonne National Lab
Website of Paul Fisher

Location: Purdue University

Apr 26, 2014 2:00 PM

We examine cost/benefit trade-offs for high-order numerical methods in the context of large-scale parallel simulations of turbulent flow. The primary vehicle for this analysis is spectral element code Nek5000, which features semi-implicit timesteppers coupled with multi-level preconditioned iterative solvers. We show that the excellent dispersion properties of the spectral element method that are evident in linear problems translate into significant computational savings in nonlinear applications. We close with a few remarks about scaling to beyond a million processors.