A Memory-Saving Algorithm for Spectral Method of Three-Dimensional Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence

Abstract

Homogeneous isotropic turbulence has been playing a key role in the research of turbulence theory. And the pseudo-spectral method is the most popular numerical method to simulate this type of flow fields in a periodic box, where fast Fourier transform (FFT) is mostly effective. However, the bottle-neck in this method is the memory of computer, which motivates us to construct a memory-saving algorithm for spectral method in present paper. Inevitably, more times of FFT are needed as compensation. In the most memory-saving situation, only 6 three-dimension arrays are employed in the code. The cost of computation is increased by a factor of 4, and that 38 FFTs are needed per time step instead of the previous 9 FFTs. A simulation of isotropic turbulence on 2048³ grid can be implemented on a 256G distributed memory clusters through this method.