Direct Numerical Simulations of Turbulent Boundary Layers on High Performance Computers

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of turbulent zero pressure gradient boundary layers have been performed on two high performance computers with different architectures. The one, a Cray T3E-900, is a massively parallel computer (HLRS computing center, Stuttgart/Germany). The other, a Fujitsu VPP700, is a Vector-parallel computer (Leibniz Computing Center, Munich/Germany). Both computers are well suited for large-scale flow computations. For the first time a DNS with a locally refined grid near the wall has been applied for spatially developing flows. This approach leads to considerable savings of computational time compared to a full grid simulation.