Deep exploration of shallow waters

I was invited to participate in SummerOfHPC for the last moment, because one of the guys had some complications and had to cancel his participation. I was really surprised and happy to get this unexpected opportunity all of sudden. So, on Saturday 9^th of July, I left my home to start this exciting experience that was lying ahead. I crossed the Czech Republic by a train first, and then took a plane from Prague directly to Dublin, the capital of Ireland. After my plane, shook by the strong Irish wind, finally landed at Dublin airport, my journey was finished.

Tower Building – ICHEC Dublin office location

On Monday, I reached the ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) building near the Liffey river. I met some of the people working there, who kindly welcomed me to my new working place, including my project supervisor, Dr. Adam Ralph. He introduced me to the problematics of the project and assigned me some initial tasks. The main aim of my project is visualisation of fluid and waves. Honestly, I can not imagine a better place to work on water simulation code than Ireland, which is surrounded by the ocean, and the ICHEC office itself is located right next to the Grand Canal in Dublin.

Specifically, I will work on visualising the output from a mathematical model, provided by ICHEC. The model is a simple program, written in Fortran, which serially executes given number of steps of a time simulation of wave propagation in fluid. The other task included in my project is to parallelise the code of the model, so it can take an advantage of high performance computer clusters and supercomputers. For this, I will get a chance to lay my fingers (not literally) on Fionn – ICHEC’s supercomputer cluster.

A ship sailing off the Dublin bay – a typical example of shallow water

The core of the model is shallow water equations. These equations are derived as a simplification of Navier – Stokes equations, which are probably most common equations used for fluid flow modeling. The shallow water equations are used for modeling the fluid flow in situations where the horizontal size of the area is far bigger than the vertical, and the flow in vertical direction is negligible. The examples of such situations could be beach waves, ocean flows, tsunami (even though oceans are definitely not shallow, their depth is still nothing compared to their horizontal size), air flows in atmosphere, and others.

My work on the project has only just begun, and so has my exploration of interesting places in Dublin and whole Ireland. And I believe there are plenty of them, so I look forward to the following weeks and share my new impressions and progress with you.