Abstract
RMA-11 is a numerical model widely used for studing the transport of constituents andwater quality in rivers and estuaries. When applied to large water systems like the R´ıode la Plata, RMA-11 demands long execution times to compute a simulation. This pa-per presents the analysis of the computational efficiency for the RMA-11 applied to atransport model of the R´ıo de la Plata, and introduces a proposal for improving the effi-ciency by using high performance computing techniques. The improved implementationmodifies the linear system resolution methodology implemented in the model. A highperformance computing strategy was applied to the FRONTALL routine of the RMA-11,by changing their logical structure and using a sparse storage format. The experimentalresults obtained when solving representative test cases show a significant improvementon the performance, achieving significant gains in computational speed: the executiontime of the implemented version decreased up to one third of the time of the originalimplementation.
Highlights
The research applying numerical models to solve environmental fluid dynamics problems has increased notably over the last decades
High performance computing (HPC) techniques are applied to the RMA-11 model in order to develop an efficient version that allows reducing the computing time required to perform the simulation of large scenarios
RMA-11 is a widely used numerical model for engineering applications. It is a finite element water quality model for simulation of one, two, and three-dimensional estuaries, bays, lakes and rivers, which has been applied to the Rıo de la Plata [3] as well as other water systems around the world [4, 5]
Summary
The research applying numerical models to solve environmental fluid dynamics problems has increased notably over the last decades. The RMA finite element method set is used to model the Rıo de la Plata. An important drawback of the FEM approach is the lose of computational efficiency This drawback limits the application of RMA model to large dimension realistic scenarios and it makes it hard to implement a three-dimensional hydrodynamic version of RMA or to use with high resolution meshes. HPC techniques are applied to the RMA-11 model in order to develop an efficient version that allows reducing the computing time required to perform the simulation of large scenarios. The improved version was evaluated by comparing the computational performance and the numerical results with those obtained with the original version for several test cases that model the Rıo de la Plata.
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