Analysis and application of a parallel spectral element method for the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract We present an analysis of the parallel spectral element method for solution of the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in general three-dimensional geometries. The approach combines high-order spatial discretizations with iterative solution techniques in a way which exploits with high efficiency the currently available medium-grained distributed-memory parallel computers. Measured performance analysis on the Intel vector hypercubes and example Navier-Stokes calculations demonstrate that parallel processing can now be considered an effective fluid mechanics analysis tool.