Incompact3d: A powerful tool to tackle turbulence problems with up to O(105) computational cores

Understanding the nature of complex turbulent flows remains one of the most challenging problems in classical physics. Significant progress has been made recently using high performance computing, and computational fluid dynamics is now a credible alternative to experiments and theories in order to understand the rich physics of turbulence. In this paper, we present an efficient numerical tool called Incompact3d that can be coupled with massive parallel platforms in order to simulate turbulence problems with as much complexity as possible, using up to O(10⁵) computational cores by means of direct numerical simulation (DNS). DNS is the simplest approach conceptually to investigate turbulence, featuring the highest temporal and spatial accuracy and it requires extraordinary powerful resources. This paper is an extension of Laizet et al.(Comput. Fluids 2010; 39 (3):471–484) where the authors proposed a strategy to run DNS with up to 1024 computational cores. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.