Parallelisation of a finite volume method for hydrodynamic inundation modelling

Abstract

Geoscience Australia and the Australian National University are developing a hydrodynamic inundation modelling tool called anuga to help simulate the impact of natural inundation hazards such as riverine ooding, storm surges and tsunamis. The core of anuga is a Python implementation of a finite volume method, based on triangular meshes, for solving the conservative form of the Shallow Water Wave equation. We describe the parallelisation of the code using a domain decomposition strategy where we use the metis graph partitioning library to decompose the finite volume meshes. The parallel efficiency of our code is tested using a number of mesh partitions, and we verify that the metis graph partition is particularly efficient.