(Credit:iStock)
Challenge
Any investment in a new residential or recreational development demands an accurate and
thorough up-front assessment of the potential risks involved. Developments on or close to the
coastline come with the added risk of potential land erosion caused by the local wave regime. Civil
engineering and environmental hydraulics specialist HR Wallingford were contracted to clarify the
severity of the threat to a proposed development in the Middle East The limitations in HR Wallingford’s
in-house computing resources placed substantial constraints on the time allowed to complete the
necessary computer modelling exercise. The data generated by this exercise would be crucial to
establishing whether the development would be practicable and affordable to insure. In view of
the commercial pressures involved, the client needed to resolve this issue as fast as possible.
Approach
HR Wallingford harnessed the computing capabilities of ‘Blue Wonder’ at the Hartree Centre, an
IBM iDataPlex cluster with a total of nearly 8,200 data-processing cores. This cluster offers strong
performance in parallel processing, enabling large numbers of modelling runs to be undertaken
concurrently, rather than one after another. This reduced the amount of time needed to run 20
years worth of wave and wind data using TOMAWAC, a 3rd generation wave transformation solver
developed by a consortium including energy company EDF (France), government agency BAW
(Germany) and HR Wallingford with the Hartree Centre (UK). Scripts specially developed for HR
Wallingford were loaded onto the Hartree infrastructure, enabling this software to perform parallel
simulations on high-end computing resources.
Benefits
The outcome was a better understanding of local wave behaviour in terms of key physical
phenomena such as wave propagation, refraction, shoaling and their implications for coastline
erosion. The required data was also produced significantly faster than would have been possible
using conventional computing resources. As a result, HR Wallingford were able to deliver their
findings and interpretations to their client much more quickly. This equipped the client to reach
appropriate decisions in a timely and cost-effective manner – a critical benefit in the highly
competitive coastal residential and recreational development sector in all parts of the world.
