Large-Scale direct numerical simulations of turbulence using GPUs and modern Fortran

We present our approach to making direct numerical simulations of turbulence with applications in sustainable shipping. We use modern Fortran and the spectral element method to leverage and scale on supercomputers powered by the Nvidia A100 and the recent AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs, while still providing support for user software developed in Fortran. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by performing the world’s first direct numerical simulation of the flow around a Flettner rotor at Re = 30,000 and its interaction with a turbulent boundary layer. We present a performance comparison between the AMD Instinct MI250X and Nvidia A100 GPUs for scalable computational fluid dynamics. Our results show that one MI250X offers performance on par with two A100 GPUs and has a similar power efficiency based on readings from on-chip energy sensors.