"HydroGeoSphere: Numerical Methods and Parallel Processing" - Aquanty Webinar

On February 8th, 2022 Dr. Peter Forsyth and Dr. Hyoun-Tae Hwang delivered a webinar to review the numerical principles/methodologies that drive HydroGeoSphere simulations.

Dr. Forsyth provided a general review of the control-volume finite element method and associated concepts, including monotonicity, mass conservation, and the sparse matrix solver embedded in HGS. This solver is based on a PCG-like method which uses an incomplete LU factorization preconditioner. Level or drop tolerance preconditioning can be specified.

Dr. Hwang reviewed the flexible parallel computing capabilities provided by HydroGeoSphere using the OpenMP framework. Fully-integrated hydrologic simulations, such as those performed with HGS, involve highly nonlinear processes, and thus the computational efficiency of the model becomes a critical issue for those performing hydrologic simulations. As such, Aquanty is constantly looking for ways to increase the computational efficiency of HGS, and parallelization is one part of that effort. The HGS parallelization framework allows the same code to be executed on various shared memory platforms with minimal maintenance and provides a flexible methodology for the efficient construction of the coefficient and Jacobian matrices.

For more details on how HydroGeoSphere was parallelized see Hwang et al., 2014 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.201...).