Distributed memory parallel computing of three-dimensional variable-density groundwater flow and salt transport

J. Verkaik*, J. van Engelen, S. Huizer, M. F.P. Bierkens, H. X. Lin, G. H.P. Oude Essink

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Fresh groundwater reserves, being of vital importance for more than a billion of people living in the coastal zone, are being threatened by saltwater intrusion due to anthropogenic activities and climate change. High resolution three-dimensional (3D), variable-density (VD), groundwater flow and salt transport (FT) numerical models are increasingly being used to support water managers and decision makers in their strategic planning and measures for dealing with the problem of fresh water shortages. However, these computer models typically require long runtimes and large memory usage, making them impractical to use without parallelization. Here, we parallelize SEAWAT, and show that with our parallelization 3D-VD-FT modeling is now feasible for a wide range of hydrogeologists, since a) speedups of more than two orders of magnitude can be obtained as illustrated in this paper, and b) large 3D-VD-FT models are feasible with memory requirements far exceeding single machine memory.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103976
Pages (from-to)1-13
Number of pages13
JournalAdvances in Water Resources
Volume154
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Christian D. Langevin and Joseph D. Hughes for their suggestions and comments on parallelization SEAWAT. We also thank Deltares and Utrecht University for making this research possible. This work was part of the development of iMOD WQ (https://oss.deltares.nl/nl/web/imod) and we thank Gijs Janssen for his support. Furthermore, we thank Edwin Sutanudjaja and Martijn Russcher for their support on running jobs on Cartesius. All experiments were carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative. The authors also would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Funding

We thank Christian D. Langevin and Joseph D. Hughes for their suggestions and comments on parallelization SEAWAT. We also thank Deltares and Utrecht University for making this research possible. This work was part of the development of iMOD WQ (https://oss.deltares.nl/nl/web/imod) and we thank Gijs Janssen for his support. Furthermore, we thank Edwin Sutanudjaja and Martijn Russcher for their support on running jobs on Cartesius. All experiments were carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative. The authors also would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Keywords

  • Distributed memory
  • Numerical modelling
  • Parallel computing
  • Salt transport
  • SEAWAT
  • Variable-density groundwater flow

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