To realize numerical towing-tank tests by substantially shortening the time to the solution, a general-purpose Finite-Element flow solver, named FrontFlow/blue (FFB), has been fully optimized so as to achieve maximum possible sustained memory throughputs with three of its four hot kernels. A single-node sustained performance of 179.0 GFLOPS, which corresponds to 5.3% of the peak performance, has been achieved on Fugaku, the next flagship computer of Japan. A weak-scale benchmark test has confirmed that FFB runs with a parallel efficiency of over 85% up to 5,505,024 compute cores, and an overall sustained performance of16.7 PFLOPS has been achieved. As a result, the time needed for large-eddy simulation using 32 billion grids has been significantly reduced from almost two days to only 37 min., or by a factor of 71. This has clearly indicated that a numerical towing-tank could actually be built for ship hydrodynamics within a few years.

The general-purpose fluid simulation software FrontFlow/blue (FFB) is based on the finite element method (FEM). It was designed to accept extremely large-scale simulations and is an important application in the manufacturing field in Japan. Moreover, since this application is significant in both the manufacturing field and the development of the post-K supercomputer, it is employed as an important application for the new post-K supercomputer that is under development. The K computer is still the important infrastructure in Japan. And there are some supercomputers having the same architecture to the K computer. Therefore we continue to improve the performance of the FFB on the K computer. On significant subroutines, several improvement techniques, store order based loop modification decreasing total load and store operations, unrolled loop rerolling to employ SIMD load instruction, adjusting number of arrays in loop, using sector cache function, and so on, were employed. As a result, an improvement of 160% was obtained on a single CPU performance. This paper shows and discusses the detail of these improvements.