Petascale turbulence simulation using a highly parallel fast multipole method on GPUs

We present a 0.5 Petaflop/s calculation of homogeneous isotropic turbulence in a cube of 2048 particles, using a highly parallel fast multipole method (FMM) using 2048 GPUs on the TSUBAME 2.0 system. We compare this particle-based code with a spectral DNS code under the same calculation condition and the same machine. The results of our particlebased turbulence simulation match quantitatively with that of the spectral method. The calculation time for one time step is approximately 30 seconds for both methods; this result shows that the scalability of the FMM starts to become an advantage over FFT-based methods beyond 2000 GPUs.