Acceleration of Watlab hydraulic simulation tool : CPU parallelization, memory optimization and feasibility study of GPU implementation

Details

Supervisors

Gousenbourger, Pierre-Yves ; Soares Frazao, Sandra

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en mathématiques appliquées, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enWatlab is a program written in C++ and developed by the hydraulic research team of UCLouvain. It solves the shallow water equations, enabling simulation of water dynamics that finds many applications such as flood studies. However, the program is computationally intensive and long execution times are often needed to produce realistic simulations. The following manuscript presents all the techniques explored to try to speed up Watlab, including the use of multicore processor architecture through parallelism, optimization of memory accesses and the exploitation of the computational power of graphics processors. Importance is given to the development of numerically stable, efficient and portable implementations that can be used by the largest number of users. The effectiveness of the proposed solutions is empirically assessed on representative case studies.