SERGHEI (-SWE) v1.0: a performance portable HPC shallow water solver for hydrology and environmental hydraulics

Abstract

Abstract. The Simulation Environment for Geomorphology, Hydrodynamics and Ecohydrology in Integrated form (SERGHEI) is a multi-dimensional, multi-domain and multi-physics model framework for environmental and landscape simulation, designed with an outlook towards Earth System Modelling. It aims to provide a modelling environment for hydrodynamics, ecohydrology, morphodynamics, and, most importantly, interactions and feedbacks among such processes at different levels of complexity and across spatiotemporal scales. The small scale feedbacks and interactions, which warrant high resolution, can result in emergent behaviours manifesting at larger scales, thus warranting large model domains. At the core of SERGHEI's technical innovation is its HPC implementation, built from scratch on the Kokkos portability layer. Consequently, SERGHEI achieves performance-portability from personal computers to top HPC systems, including GPU-based and heterogeneous systems. SERGHEI relies Kokkos to handle memory spaces, thread management and execution policies for the required backend programming models. In this work we explore combinations of MPI and Kokkos using OpenMP and CUDA backends. In this contribution, we introduce the SERGHEI model framework, and present with detail its first operational module for solving shallow water equations (SERGHEI-SWE). This module is designed to be applicable to hydrological, environmental and consequently Earth System Modelling problems, but also to classical engineering problems such as fluvial or urban flood modelling. We also provide evidence of its applicability by testing it against several well-known benchmarks. We also evaluate its performance on several benchmarks and large scale problems. Finally, SERGHEI-SWE is evaluated in terms of scaling (on several TOP500 HPC systems).