Publication Date:
2022-03-10
Description:
In the last years, the interest in three-dimensional physico-mathematical models for volcanic
plumes has grown, motivated by the need of predicting accurately the dispersal patterns of
volcanic ash in the atmosphere (to mitigate the risks for civil aviation and for the nearby inhabited
regions) and pushed by improved remote sensing techniques and measurements. However,
limitations due to the mesh resolution and numerical accuracy as well as the complexity entailed
model formulations, have so far prevented a detailed study of turbulence in volcanic plumes at
high resolution. Eruptive columns are indeed multiphase gas-particle turbulent flows, in which the
largest (integral) scale is in the order of tens or hundreds of kilometers and the smallest scale is of
the order of microns. Performing accurate numerical simulations of such phenomena remains
therefore a challenging task.
Modern HPC resources and recent model developments enable the study of multiphase turbulent
structures of volcanic plumes with an unprecedented level of detail. However, a number of issues
of the present model implementation need to be addressed in order to efficiently use the
computational resources of modern supercomputing machines. Here we present an overview of
an optimization strategy that allows us to perform large parallel simulations of volcanic plumes
using ASHEE, a numerical solver based on OpenFOAM and one of the target flagship codes of the
project ChEESE (Centre of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth). Such optimizations include:
mixed precision floating point operations to increase computational speed and reduce memory
usage, optimal domain decomposition for better communication load balancing and
asynchronous I/O to hide I/O costs. Scaling analysis and volcanic plume simulations are presented
to demonstrate the improvement in both computational performances and computing capability.
Description:
Published
Description:
online
Description:
3IT. Calcolo scientifico
Keywords:
High performance computing, volcanic plumes
Repository Name:
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV)
Type:
Oral presentation
