Real-World Oceanographic Simulations on the GPU using a Two-Dimensional Finite-Volume Scheme

TL;DR

This paper presents an extended high-resolution finite-volume scheme for real-world ocean simulations on GPUs, incorporating features like moving fronts, land masks, and wind forcing, verified through coastal experiments and demonstrating excellent scalability.

Contribution

It introduces a GPU-optimized finite-volume model with new features for large-scale ocean simulations, validated against operational forecasts.

Findings

Perfect weak scaling on P100 GPU

Accurate tidal wave forecasts at reduced computational cost

Open-source implementation available

Abstract

In this work, we take a modern high-resolution finite-volume scheme for solving the rotational shallow-water equations and extend it with features required to run real-world ocean simulations. Our contributions include a spatially varying north vector and Coriolis term required for large scale domains, moving wet-dry fronts, a static land mask, bottom shear stress, wind forcing, boundary conditions for nesting in a global model, and an efficient model reformulation that makes it well-suited for massively parallel implementations. Our model order is verified using a grid convergence test, and we show numerical experiments using three different sections along the coast of Norway based on data originating from operational forecasts run at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Our simulation framework shows perfect weak scaling on a modern P100 GPU, and is capable of providing tidal wave forecasts that are very close to the operational model at a fraction of the cost. All source code and data used in this work are publicly available under open licenses.