Proof of concept of regional scale hydrologic simulations at hydrologic resolution utilizing massively parallel computer resources

Kollet, S.; Woodward, C. S.; Vereecken, H.; Smith, S.; Vanderborght, J.; Maxwell, R. M.; Simmer, C.

doi:10.1029/2009WR008730

Journal Article

Proof of concept of regional scale hydrologic simulations at hydrologic resolution utilizing massively parallel computer resources

Kollet, S. ; Maxwell, R. M. ; Woodward, C. S. ; Smith, S. ; Vanderborght, J.FZJ* ; Vereecken, H.FZJ* ; Simmer, C.

2010
AGU Washington, DC

Water resources research 46, W04201 (2010) [10.1029/2009WR008730]

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Please use a persistent id in citations: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/20633 doi:10.1029/2009WR008730

Abstract: We present the results of a unique, parallel scaling study using a 3-D variably saturated flow problem including land surface processes that ranges from a single processor to a maximum number of 16,384 processors. In the applied finite difference framework and for a fixed problem size per processor, this results in a maximum number of approximately 8 x 10(9) grid cells (unknowns). Detailed timing information shows that the applied simulation platform ParFlow exhibits excellent parallel efficiency. This study demonstrates that regional scale hydrologic simulations on the order of 10(3) km(2) are feasible at hydrologic resolution (similar to 10(0)-10(1) m laterally, 10(-2)-10(-1) m vertically) with reasonable computation times, which has been previously assumed to be an intractable computational problem.

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Note: The financial support by the SFB/TR 32 "Pattern in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Systems: Monitoring, Modeling, and Data Assimilation" funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the John von Neumann Institute for Computing of the Forschungszentrum Julich and project JICG42, "Inverse Modeling of Terrestrial Systems," for providing the required compute time on JUGENE. Portions of this work were performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. We also would like to thank Praveen Kumar, John Selker, Eric Wood, Dennis Lettenmaier, and one anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions that greatly improved the quality of the manuscript.

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