2025-12-04 –, Quest
Importance of Simulation of Surface Water Systems
Forecasting of flooding, morphology and water quality in coastal and estuarine areas, rivers, and lakes is of great importance for society. To tackle this, the Delft3D Flexible Mesh Suite (Delft3D FM) has been developed by Deltares. Delft3D FM is used worldwide and consists of modules for modelling hydrodynamics, waves, morphology, water quality, and ecology.
Need for HPC Optimization in Real-Life Applications
There is urgency to make Delft3D FM more efficient and scalable for high performance computing for large scale models of real-life applications. The range of these applications is quite broad: from forecasting of flooding near the dikes to ecological impact assessments of wind parks and/or floating solar panels and from the design of harbours to large scale land reclamation projects. For that purpose, a small project focussed on new benchmarks to get an actual status of the parallel performance. These benchmarks of Delft3D FM were performed a.o. on Snellius from SURF for several typical real-life applications.
Use of Sixth-Generation Models and Snellius Benchmarks
Several selected cases are from the sixth-generation models for Rijkswaterstaat. These models are developed and under maintenance for a broad application range in the main Dutch waterbodies and used by other parties for applications also (requests via iplo.nl). On Snellius the Apptainer version of Delft3D FM was used for the benchmarks. Deltares offers maintenance and support for this Apptainer version, also in combination with the sixth-generation models. The Apptainer version of Delft3D FM is available also for other users of Snellius.
Menno Genseberger studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam. PhD research at Utrecht University and CWI was on domain decomposition to enable HPC for large scale eigenvalue problems from plasma physics and oceanography.
He joined Deltares in 2002. First by developing simulation software for surface water. He gave also lead to a discipline numerical methods. Later focus shifted to coupled hydrodynamical and transport modelling for lakes. In 2010 he initiated a pilot on HPC for Deltares at SURF. The years that followed this resulted in several European projects in which Deltares and SURF collaborated on HPC for simulation software of surface water.