  The present paper addresses the numerical solution of turbulent flows with
high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods for discretizing the incompressible
Navier-Stokes equations. The efficiency of high-order methods when applied to
under-resolved problems is an open issue in literature. This topic is carefully
investigated in the present work by the example of the 3D Taylor-Green vortex
problem. Our implementation is based on a generic high-performance framework
for matrix-free evaluation of finite element operators with one of the best
realizations currently known. We present a methodology to systematically
analyze the efficiency of the incompressible Navier-Stokes solver for high
polynomial degrees. Due to the absence of optimal rates of convergence in the
under-resolved regime, our results reveal that demonstrating improved
efficiency of high-order methods is a challenging task and that optimal
computational complexity of solvers, preconditioners, and matrix-free
implementations are necessary ingredients to achieve the goal of better
solution quality at the same computational costs already for a geometrically
simple problem such as the Taylor-Green vortex. Although the analysis is
performed for a Cartesian geometry, our approach is generic and can be applied
to arbitrary geometries. We present excellent performance numbers on modern,
cache-based computer architectures achieving a throughput for operator
evaluation of 3e8 up to 1e9 DoFs/sec on one Intel Haswell node with 28 cores.
Compared to performance results published within the last 5 years for
high-order DG discretizations of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, our
approach reduces computational costs by more than one order of magnitude for
the same setup.
