Time for Large-Scale Modeling? SRH-2D Parallelization Techniques and Speedup Results

Abstract Submission: 2D hydraulic modeling has been routinely carried out for practical projects in recent years due to the availability to the public of several stable and reliable general-purpose 2D hydraulic models. However, 2D modeling is generally limited to applications with small- to medium-spatial scale as the computing time may become prohibitively long on most desktop PCs used by engineers. In recent years, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been exploring techniques to significantly speed up the hydraulic model SRH-2D; the objective is to be able to perform large-scale 2D hydraulic modeling within a reasonable turn-around time.

In this talk, the Reclamation 2D model parallelization program is introduced. Both MPI and GPU techniques are implemented into SRH-2D. For benchmarking, a number of large rivers from practical projects are simulated and demonstrated. The results of these cases and the speedup achieved with the MPI and GPU techniques will be presented. It is concluded that the current technology has been advanced such that the time has come for large-scale 2D hydraulic modeling for engineering applications. In addition to commenting on the recommended technique for the future of hydraulic modeling, we will also discuss guidelines on the largest spatial scale that may be simulated and how to estimate the runtime given a particular size of the problem.

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