Scalable Delft3D Flexible Mesh for Efficient Modelling of Shallow Water and Transport Processes

M. Mogé, M. J. Russcher, A. Emerson, M. Genseberger
2019 Zenodo  
D-Flow Flexible Mesh ("D-Flow FM") [1] is the hydrodynamic module of the Delft3D Flexible Mesh Suite [2]. Since for typical, real-life applications there is a need to make D-Flow FM more efficient and scalable for high performance computing, we profiled and analysed D-Flow FM for representative test cases. In the current paper, we discuss the conclusions of our profiling and analysis. We observed that, for specific models, D-Flow FM can be used for parallel simulations using up to a few hundred
more » ... cores with good efficiency. It was however observed that D-Flow FM is MPI bound when scaled up. Therefore, for further improvement, we investigated two optimisation strategies described below. The parallelisation is based on mesh decomposition and the use of deep halo regions may lead to significant mesh imbalance. Therefore, we first investigated different partitioning and repartitioning strategies to improve the load balance and thus reduce the time spent waiting on MPI communications. We obtained small performance gains in some cases, but further investigations and broader changes in the numerical methods would be needed for this to be usable in a general case. As a second option we tried to use a communication-hiding conjugate gradient method, PETSc's linear solver KSPPIPECG, to solve the linear system arising from the spatial discretisation, but we were not able to get any performance improvement or to reproduce the speedup published by the authors. The performance of this method turns out to be very architecture and compiler dependent, which prevents its use in a more general-purpose code like D-Flow FM.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3527660 fatcat:qvgdt4twv5cs5gqrcfziwifwc4