Paving the way to AMR groundwater simulations with Parflow+p4est

abstract: The software library ParFlow is a complex parallel code that is used extensively for high performance computing, specifically for the simulation of surface and subsurface flow. The code discretizes the corresponding partial differential equations using cell centered finite differences on a uniform hexahedral mesh. Even with the current supercomputing resources, using uniform meshes may translate in prohibitively expensive computations for certain simulations. A solution to this problem is to employ adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to enforce a higher mesh resolution only whenever it is required. To this this end, we have relegated ParFlow's mesh management to the parallel AMR library p4est. During this seminar, Jose Fonseca, postdoc researcher at CEA / Maison de la Simulation, will present the algorithmic approach used to perform this coupling and our latest efforts to generalize ParFlow's native discretization to the locally refined meshes obtained with p4est.