Grant: Engage Grants Program

Manitoba Hydro's resource planning process is influenced by water supply and electrical energy demand. As aresult, understanding the sensitivity of planning decisions to future streamflow scenarios are important to theirintegrated resource planning process. Streamflow scenarios can be developed by combining global climatemodel simulated runoff values with the WATROUTE routing model for the Nelson-Churchill Watershed. Therouting model is implemented in WATROUTE, the routing component of the Canadian Hydrological Model(CHARM) suite of programs. Further, WATROUTE is the computational bottleneck for the streamflowsimulation processes, incurring long runtimes, especially when projecting many years into the future. Thus,finding ways of significantly reducing the runtime of WATROUTE is of great importance to Manitoba Hydro.Moreover, the parallel nature of the routing model is an ideal fit for execution on the massively parallelprocessors inherent in graphics processing units (GPUs), which have recently become available forgeneral-purpose scientific computing. Consequently, the aim of this Engage Grant is to to create ahighly-parallel, GPU-based, high-performance-computing implementation of the WATROUTE routing modelto improve Manitoba Hydro's resource planning process. Additionally, benefits realized by this work may havea positive impact on the MEC-Surface and Hydrology System (MESH) and the Canadian Regional ClimateModel, as both use WATROUTE.