Xcompact3d — The Complete Guide: Free High-Order Turbulence Simulation on Supercomputers
Xcompact3d is an open-source (BSD-licensed) suite of flow solvers for turbulence research, written in Fortran. It uses high-order compact finite differences on Cartesian meshes, with near-spectral accuracy and very low numerical dissipation — exactly what you need to resolve the eddies themselves rather than just the average.
Xcompact3d
Xcompact3d Project
A high-order CFD solver for turbulence research on large parallel machines.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Compact schemes — up to sixth order, for high accuracy on a given mesh.
- DNS and LES — direct numerical simulation and large-eddy simulation.
- Bodies in the flow — an immersed boundary method for a cylinder, wing or turbine, without a body-fitted mesh.
- Spectral pressure solver — the Poisson equation solved with FFTs.
- Scale — domain decomposition with 2DECOMP&FFT, up to tens of thousands of cores.
Who it suits
Turbulence researchers and PhD students running wall-bounded flows, jets, wakes and wind farms on supercomputers. Geometry is limited to a Cartesian domain, and work is done through input files and the command line on Linux. For an engineering problem with complex geometry, it is the wrong tool.
Related tools
For high-order methods on unstructured meshes — Nektar++. For general engineering CFD — OpenFOAM. To view large fields — ParaView or VisIt.
Nektar++
Imperial College London / University of Utah
A spectral/hp element framework for high-accuracy simulation.
Get it from the vendor
OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM Foundation
Comprehensive CFD solvers — flow, turbulence, heat transfer and multiphase. Text-file driven, no GUI.
Get it from the vendor
ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
Get it from the vendorVisIt — Simulation Results Visualization
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Scientific visualization tool for large datasets from FEA and CFD simulations.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Xcompact3d is a fast, accurate research tool for large-scale turbulence — completely free and open.