Neko

Neko is a portable framework for high-order spectral element flow simulations. Written in modern Fortran, Neko adopts an object-oriented approach, allowing multi-tier abstractions of the solver stack and facilitating various hardware backends.

About the software

Neko is a CFD solver for incompressible flows using the spectral element method. It is characterised by high accuracy and low numerical diffusivity making it a perfect tool for studying the advection dominated flows, especially turbulence. That is why it is used for various aerospace or climate applications. It is especially well suited for solving large-scale problems due to its very good parallel performance. Using a device abstraction layer approach, it can be efficiently run on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs as well as SX AURORA vector cards. The minimal requirements to build the code are a Fortran compiler supporting the Fortran-08 standard, a working MPI installation and the BLAS/lapack libraries. However, some code functionalities require additional external libraries e.g., ParMETIS (for work balance) or ADIOS2 (for data compression of the I/O and in-situ data operations).

Software details

Neko demonstrated almost perfect parallel performance on the GPU partition of the entire EuroHPC pre-exascale machines LUMI and Leonardo and was among the finalists of the Gordon-Bell prize in 2023. It is developed at KTH in collaboration with other universities e.g., FAU, DTU and KAUST.

Code license

3-Clause BSD

Code URL

https://neko.cfd/
https://github.com/ExtremeFLOW/neko

Programming language

Fortran 2008, C++, C, CUDA, HIP, OpenCL

Availability

Public