We present new results on the strong parallel scaling for the OpenACC-accelerated implementation of the high-order spectral element fluid dynamics solver Nek5000. The test case considered consists of a direct numerical simulation of fully-developed turbulent flow in a straight pipe, at two different Reynolds numbers Reτ = 360 and Reτ = 550, based on friction velocity and pipe radius. The strong scaling is tested on several GPU-enabled HPC systems, including the Swiss Piz Daint system, TACC’s Longhorn, Jülich’s JUWELS Booster, and Berzelius in Sweden. The performance results show that speed-up between 3-5 can be achieved using the GPU accelerated version compared with the CPU version on these different systems. The run-time for 20 timesteps reduces from 43.5 to 13.2 seconds with increasing the number of GPUs from 64 to 512 for Reτ = 550 case on JUWELS Booster system. This illustrates the GPU accelerated version the potential for high throughput. At the same time, the strong scaling limit is significantly larger for GPUs, at about 2000 − 5000 elements per rank; compared to about 50 − 100 for a CPU-rank.

This article presents a novel nonreflective boundary condition for the free surface incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Boundaries of this type are very useful when, for example, simulating water flow around a ship moving over a wide ocean. Normally waves generated by the ship will reflect off of the boundaries of the simulation domain and as these reflected waves return towards the ship they will cause undesired interference patterns. By employing a Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) approach we have derived a boundary condition that absorbs incoming waves and thus efficiently prevents these undesired wave reflections. To solve the resulting boundary equations we present a fast and stable algorithm based on the stable fluids approach. Through numerical experiments we then show that our boundaries are significantly more effective than simpler reflection preventing techniques. We also provide a thorough analysis of the parameters involved in our boundary formulation and show how they effect wave absorption efficiency.

This paper describes a novel method for regional characterization of three-dimensional vector fields using a pattern matching approach. Given a three-dimensional vector field, the goal is to automatically locate, identify, and visualize a selected set of classes of structures or features. Rather than analytically defining the properties that must be fulfilled in a region in order to be classified as a specific structure, a set of idealized patterns for each structure type is constructed. Similarity to these patterns is then defined and calculated. Examples of structures of interest include vortices, swirling flow, diverging or converging flow, and parallel flow. Both medical and aerodynamic applications are presented in this paper.

A four-dimensional mapping (three spatial dimensions + time) of myocardial strain-rate would help to describe the mechanical properties of the myocardium, which affect important physiological factors such as the pumping performance of the ventricles. Strain-rate represents the local instantaneous deformation of the myocardium and can be calculated from the spatial gradients of the velocity field. Strain-rate has previously been calculated using one-dimensional (ultrasound) or two-dimensional (2-D) magnetic resonance imaging) techniques. However, this assumes that myocardial motion only occurs in one direction or in one plane, respectively. This paper presents a method for calculation of the time-resolved three-dimensional (3-D) strain-rate tensor using velocity vector information in a 3-D spatial grid during the whole cardiac cycle. The strain-rate tensor provides full information of both magnitude and direction of the instantaneous deformation of the myocardium. A method for visualization of the full 3-D tensor is also suggested. The tensors are visualized using ellipsoids, which display the principal directions of strain-rate and the ratio between strain-rate magnitude in each direction. The presented method reveals the principal strain-rate directions without a priori knowledge of myocardial motion directions.