We present STREAmS, an in-house high-fidelity solver for large-scale, massively parallel direct numerical simulations (DNS) of compressible turbulent flows on graphical processing units (GPUs). STREAmS is written in the Fortran 90 language and it is tailored to carry out DNS of canonical compressible wall-bounded flows, namely turbulent plane channel, zero-pressure gradient turbulent boundary layer and supersonic oblique shock-wave/boundary layer interactions. The solver incorporates state-of-the-art numerical algorithms, specifically designed to cope with the challenging problems associated with the solution of high-speed turbulent flows and can be used across a wide range of Mach numbers, extending from the low subsonic up to the hypersonic regime. The use of cuf automatic kernels allowed an easy and efficient porting on the GPU architecture minimizing the changes to the original CPU code, which is also maintained. We discuss a memory allocation strategy based on duplicated arrays for host and device which carefully minimizes the memory usage making the solver suitable for large scale computations on the latest GPU cards. Comparison between different CPUs and GPUs architectures strongly favor the latter, and executing the solver on a single NVIDIA Tesla P100 corresponds to using approximately 330 Intel Knights Landing CPU cores. STREAmS shows very good strong scalability and essentially ideal weak scalability up to 2048 GPUs, paving the way to simulations in the genuine high-Reynolds number regime, possibly at friction Reynolds number $Re_τ > 10^4$. The solver is released open source under GPLv3 license and is available at https://github.com/matteobernardini/STREAmS.
Both compressible and incompressible Navier-Stokes solvers can be used and are used to solve incompressible turbulent flow problems. In the compressible case, the Mach number is then considered as a solver parameter that is set to a small value, $\mathrm{M}\approx 0.1$, in order to mimic incompressible flows. This strategy is widely used for high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The present work raises the question regarding the computational efficiency of compressible DG solvers as compared to a genuinely incompressible formulation. Our…
Reliable tracking of moving boundaries is important for the simulation of compressible fluid flows and there are a lot of contributions in literature. We recognize from the classical piston problem, a typical moving boundary problem in gas dynamics, that the acceleration is a key element in the description of the motion and it should be incorporated into the design of a moving boundary tracking (MBT) method. Technically, the resolution of the accelerated piston problem boils down to a one-sided generalized Riemann problem (GRP) solver, which is taken as the building block to construct schemes …
The kinetic theory of gases has suggested the idea of viscosity to model the effect of thermal fluctuations on the resolved flow. Supported by the assumed analogy between molecules and the eddies in a turbulent flows, the idea of an eddy viscosity has been put forward in the pioneering work by Lord Kelvin and Osborne Reynolds. In over hundred years of turbulence modeling, the numerical schemes adopted to simulate turbulent flow - with the exception of the Lattice Boltzmann methods - have never exploited this analogy in any other way. In this work, a gas-kinetic scheme is modified to simulate t…
A systematic analysis of the discrete conservation properties of non-dissipative, central-difference approximations of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations is reported. A general triple splitting of the nonlinear convective terms is considered, and energy-preserving formulations are fully characterized by deriving a two-parameter family of split forms. Previously developed formulations reported in literature are shown to be particular members of this family; novel splittings are introduced and discussed as well. Furthermore, the conservation properties yielded by different choices for the …
Large-eddy simulation of incompressible turbulent flow has been extensively investigated; hence, a variety of models suited for different numerical schemes have been developed. In the case of compressible flow, the modeling is more challenging due to the numerous terms that arise in the filtered Navier-Stokes equations. Recently, modal explicit filtering was implemented in the discontinuous spectral element method (DSEM) to mimic the effects of sub-filtered scales for compressible flows. The method is computationally inexpensive since it is implemented in the DSEM code using a well-established…
We present an improved high-order weighted compact high resolution (WCHR) scheme that extends the idea of weighted compact nonlinear schemes (WCNS's) using nonlinear interpolations in conjunction with compact finite difference schemes for shock-capturing in compressible turbulent flows. The proposed scheme has better resolution property than previous WCNS's. This is achieved by using a compact (or spatially implicit) form instead of the traditional fully explicit form for the nonlinear interpolation. Since compact interpolation schemes tend to have lower dispersion errors compared to explicit …
In the Part 1 of the present paper the performance of several different low and high-order finite-volume methods were assessed by investigating how well they can capture the turbulent spectra of a compressible flow where small smooth turbulent structures interact with shocks and discontinuities. The comparisons showed that a second-order Godunov method with PPM interpolation provides results virtually the same as a fourth-order WENO scheme but at a significant lower cost. However, it is shown that the PPM method fails to provide an accurate representation in the high-frequency range of the spe…
There are several approaches to describe flows with particles e.g. Lattice-Gas Automata (LGA), Lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) or smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). These approaches do not use fixed grids on which the Navier-Stokes equations are solved via e.g. finite volume method. The flow is simulated using a multitude of particles or particle density distributions, which interacts and due to statistical laws and an even more fundamental approach than the Navier-Stokes equation, the averaged flow variables can be derived. After a short summary of the most popular particle methods the new…
The performance of high-order gas-kinetic scheme (HGKS) has been investigated for the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of isotropic compressible turbulence up to the supersonic regime. Due to the multi-scale nature and coupled temporal-spatial evolution process, HGKS provides a valid tool for the numerical simulation of compressible turbulent flow. Based on the domain decomposition and message passing interface (MPI), a parallel HGKS code is developed for large-scale computation in this paper. The standard tests from the nearly incompressible flow to the supersonic one, including Taylor-Green…
The turbulent dynamo may explain the origin of cosmic magnetism. While the exponential amplification of magnetic fields has been studied for incompressible gases, little is known about dynamo action in highly-compressible, supersonic plasmas, such as the interstellar medium of galaxies and the early Universe. Here we perform the first quantitative comparison of theoretical models of the dynamo growth rate and saturation level with three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical simulations of supersonic turbulence with grid resolutions of up to 1024^3 cells. We obtain numerical convergence and find th…
Turbulent compressible flows are traditionally simulated using explicit time integrators applied to discretized versions of the Navier-Stokes equations. However, the associated Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition severely restricts the maximum time step size. Exploiting the Lagrangian nature of the Boltzmann equation's material derivative, we now introduce a feasible three-dimensional semi-Lagrangian lattice Boltzmann method (SLLBM), which circumvents this restriction. While many lattice Boltzmann methods for compressible flows were restricted to two dimensions due to the enormous number of disc…
This paper presents an extension of the hybrid scheme proposed by Wang et al. (J. Comput. Phys. 229 (2010) 169-180) for numerical simulation of compressible isotropic turbulence to flows with higher turbulent Mach numbers. The scheme still utilizes an 8th-order compact scheme with built-in hyperviscosity for smooth regions and a 7th-order WENO scheme for highly compressive regions, but now both in their conservation formulations and for the latter with the Roe type characteristic-wise reconstruction. To enhance the robustness of the WENO scheme without compromising its high-resolution and accu…
Accurate numerical modeling of compressible flows, particularly in the turbulent regime, requires a method that is non-dissipative and stable at high Reynolds ($Re$) numbers. For a compressible flow, it is known that discrete conservation of kinetic energy is not a sufficient condition for numerical stability, unlike in incompressible flows. In this study, we adopt the recently developed conservative diffuse-interface method (Jain, Mani $\&$ Moin, $\textit{J. Comput. Phys.}$, 2020) along with the five-equation model for the simulation of compressible two-phase flows. This method discretely con…
This paper presents the benchmarking and scaling studies of a GPU accelerated three dimensional compressible magnetohydrodynamic code. The code is developed keeping an eye to explain the large and intermediate scale magnetic field generation is cosmos as well as in nuclear fusion reactors in the light of the theory given by Eugene Newman Parker. The spatial derivatives of the code are pseudo-spectral method based and the time solvers are explicit. GPU acceleration is achieved with minimal code changes through OpenACC parallelization and use of NVIDIA CUDA Fast Fourier Transform library (cuFFT)…
