  We present high-resolution direct numerical simulation studies of turbulent
Rayleigh-Benard convection in a closed cylindrical cell with an aspect ratio of
one. The focus of our analysis is on the finest scales of convective
turbulence, in particular the statistics of the kinetic energy and thermal
dissipation rates in the bulk and the whole cell. The fluctuations of the
energy dissipation field can directly be translated into a fluctuating local
dissipation scale which is found to develop ever finer fluctuations with
increasing Rayleigh number. The range of these scales as well as the
probability of high-amplitude dissipation events decreases with increasing
Prandtl number. In addition, we examine the joint statistics of the two
dissipation fields and the consequences of high-amplitude events. We also have
investigated the convergence properties of our spectral element method and have
found that both dissipation fields are very sensitive to insufficient
resolution. We demonstrate that global transport properties, such as the
Nusselt number, and the energy balances are partly insensitive to insufficient
resolution and yield correct results even when the dissipation fields are
under-resolved. Our present numerical framework is also compared with
high-resolution simulations which use a finite difference method. For most of
the compared quantities the agreement is found to be satisfactory.
