Mixed-Precision SEM-Based CFD Simulations on GPUs: A Taylor-Green Vortex case

Abstract

Mixed precision is a promising approach for reducing the computational cost and energy consumption of Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, but its effectiveness depends strongly on where precision is reduced within the full simulation pipeline. In this work, we study Taylor-Green vortex case using Neko, a matrix-free CFD solver based on the spectral element method (SEM). Profiling shows that the fluid time step is not dominated by Krylov convergence alone: the velocity and pressure solvers require only a small number of iterations per step, while a substantial fraction of runtime is spent in other SEM operators and solver components. Motivated by this structure, we propose a three-level hierarchical mixed-precision control model. Two groups of configurations are evaluated in environments bounded by 64-bit floating-point (fp64) and 32-bit floating-point (fp32) precision, respectively. The fp64-bounded group identifies accuracy sensitive components and shows that SEM-focused fp32 computation is a promising direction for future optimization. The fp32-bounded group provides the main practical benefit. For the high Reynolds number case studied, selected configurations reduce both time- and energy-to-solution by about 34% relative to the fp64 baseline, while improving robustness compared with global fp32. Targeted fp16 kernel overrides are also explored, showing potential for selected operations but increased sensitivity in gradient-based quantities such as enstrophy. Overall, these results indicate that mixed-precision for matrix-free SEM-based CFD should be treated as a simulation-level control problem rather than solely as a Krylov-solver optimization.