Uncertainty Quantification of Reduced-Precision Time Series in Turbulent Channel Flow

With increased computational power through the use of arithmetic in low-precision, a relevant question is how lower precision affects simulation results, especially for chaotic systems where analytical round-off estimates are non-trivial to obtain. In this work, we consider how the uncertainty of the time series of a direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow at Ret = 180 is affected when restricted to a reduced-precision representation. We utilize a non-overlapping batch means estimator and find that the mean statistics can, in this case, be obtained with significantly fewer mantissa bits than conventional IEEE-754 double precision, but that the mean values are observed to be more sensitive in the middle of the channel than in the near-wall region. This indicates that using lower precision in the near-wall region, where the majority of the computational efforts are required, may benefit from low-precision floating point units found in upcoming computer hardware.