  In this paper, we investigate the performance of pseudo-spectral methods in
computing nearly singular solutions of fluid dynamics equations. We consider
two different ways of removing the aliasing errors in a pseudo-spectral method.
The first one is the traditional 2/3 dealiasing rule. The second one is a high
(36th) order Fourier smoothing which keeps a significant portion of the Fourier
modes beyond the 2/3 cut-off point in the Fourier spectrum for the 2/3
dealiasing method. Both the 1D Burgers equation and the 3D incompressible Euler
equations are considered. We demonstrate that the pseudo-spectral method with
the high order Fourier smoothing gives a much better performance than the
pseudo-spectral method with the 2/3 dealiasing rule. Moreover, we show that the
high order Fourier smoothing method captures about $12 \sim 15%$ more effective
Fourier modes in each dimension than the 2/3 dealiasing method. For the 3D
Euler equations, the gain in the effective Fourier codes for the high order
Fourier smoothing method can be as large as 20% over the 2/3 dealiasing method.
Another interesting observation is that the error produced by the high order
Fourier smoothing method is highly localized near the region where the solution
is most singular, while the 2/3 dealiasing method tends to produce oscillations
in the entire domain. The high order Fourier smoothing method is also found be
very stable dynamically. No high frequency instability has been observed.
