Author(s): C. Denis; C. Moulinec; R. W. Barber; D. R. Emerson
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Hydrodynamics; HPC; Round-off error propagation; Numerical validation
Abstract: The TELEMAC-2D open source hydrodynamic suite for free surface flows is used at Electricite de France (EDF) for design studies and environmental impact assessment. The suite has been optimised for High Performance Computing in order to study larger flow domains and to increase the resolution of the grid. Recently, the TELEMAC system has been ported onto Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P. A demonstration test case using a mesh of 25 million elements has been run with TELEMAC-2D for flow along a straight channel. The overall speed-up (taking into account the time for the I/O operations) was found to be 3.4 when going from 1,024 to 4,096 cores, and approximately 4.0 when going from 1,024 to 16,384 cores, thereby demonstrating the potential of TELEMAC-2D for simulating large-scale hydrodynamic events. However, the parallel performance on high-end machines should not mask the fact that there is a crucial need to assess the final precision of the numerical simulation as round-off error propagation plays an important role in High Performance Computing. For this reason, a new approach has been developed to evaluate the precision of the hydrodynamic results.
Year: 2011