Scaling properties of convective turbulence

This report presents the current status of a computational project investigating the statistical properties and physical mechanisms of convective turbulence. Three-dimensional direct numerical simulations (DNS) based on the Boussinesq equations are conducted without introducing any additional physical approximations. The numerical resolution of 2048(3) collocation points used by the FFT-based pseudospectral scheme renders this project the largest numerical effort in turbulent convection world-wide. In the first stage the simulation code was successfully ported to the ALTIX 4700 supercomputer where several scalability and benchmarking test were performed. Utilizing this analysis the code was optimized, allowing the determination of the optimal numerical setup. The production phase has begun recently leading to first preliminary results