Spectral solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on the Connection Machine 2

The authors address the issue of solving the time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on the Connection Machine 2, for the problem of transition to turbulence on the steady flow in a channel. The spectral algorithm used serially requires O(N⁴) operations; using the massive parallelism of the CM it becomes an O(N²) problem, then solving the equations on an N×N×N grid. Preliminary timings of the code, written in Lisp, are included and compared with a corresponding code optimized for the Cray-2 for a 128×128×101 grid