Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Manitoba Hydro's resource planning process is influenced by a variety of factors including water supply andelectrical energy demand. As a result, understanding the sensitivity of planning decisions to future streamflowscenarios are important to their integrated resource planning process. Streamflow scenarios can be developedby combining global climate model simulated runoff values with the WATROUTE routing model for theNelson-Churchill Watershed. The routing model is implemented in WATROUTE, the routing component ofthe Canadian Hydrological Model (CHARM) suite of programs. Further, WATROUTE is the computationalbottleneck for the streamflow simulation processes, incurring long runtimes, especially when projecting manyyears into the future. Thus, finding ways of significantly reducing the runtime of WATROUTE is of greatimportance to Manitoba Hydro. Moreover, the parallel nature of the routing model is an ideal fit for executionon the massively parallel processors inherent in graphics processing units (GPUs), which have recently becomeavailable for general-purpose scientific computing. This work is an extension of the results from an EngageGrant with Manitoba Hydro, where the aim was to create a highly-parallel, GPU-based,high-performance-computing implementation of the WATROUTE routing model to assist Manitoba Hydro'sresource planning process. Tremendous progress was achieved toward this aim through significant reduction inthe routing model runtime. As a result, the aim of this Engage Plus Grant is to pursue the reduction ofWATROUTE's overall runtime using GPUs, produce a release ready version of WATROUTE, explore theapplication of WATROUTE to datasets previously too large to process, and investigate the use ofWATROUTE on systems with multiple GPUs. Benefits realized by this work may also have a positive impacton the MEC-Surface and Hydrology System (MESH) and the Canadian Regional Climate Model, as both useWATROUTE.