A RAM-economizing domain decomposition technique for regional high-resolution groundwater simulation

Abstract

A major limitation of the use of high-resolution groundwater models on a regional scale for resource management by water companies is the excessive RAM requirements of such models which surpass the capacity of today's PCs. A strategy is presented to overcome this problem by using overlapping domain decomposition techniques. Furthermore, because very long computing time is the bottleneck for the practical use of this technique for large groundwater models, an analysis is also presented of a number of methods implemented to increase calculation performance. The approach presented here is characterized by a fairly simple structure that represents a generalized relaxation algorithm. It can be adapted for use with finite element as well as with finite difference methods.