AbstractThe present paper presents a comparison of four different particle tracing schemes which were integrated into a parallel multiblock flow simulation program within the frame of a co‐visualization approach. One p‐space and three different c‐space particle tracing schemes are described in detail. With respect to application on high‐performance computers, parallelization and vectorization of the particle tracing schemes are discussed. The accuracy and the performance of the particle tracing schemes are analyzed extensively on the basis of several test cases. The accuracy with respect to an analytically prescribed and a numerically calculated velocity field is investigated, the latter in order to take the contribution of the flow solver's error to the overall error of the particle traces into account. Performance measurements on both scalar and vector computers are discussed. With respect to practical CFD applications and the required performance especially on vector computers, a newly developed, improved c‐space scheme is shown to be comparable to or better than the investigated p‐space scheme. According to accuracy the new c‐space scheme is considerably more advantageous than traditional c‐space methods. Finally, an application to a direct numerical simulation of a turbulent channel flow is presented. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.