GPU Acceleration of Hydraulic Transient Simulations of Large-Scale Water Supply Systems

Abstract

Simulating hydraulic transients in ultra-long water (oil, gas) transmission or large-scale distribution systems are time-consuming, and exploring ways to improve the simulation efficiency is an essential research direction. The parallel implementation of the method of characteristics (MOC) on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips is a promising approach for accelerating the simulations, because GPU has a great parallelization ability for massive but simple computations, and the explicit and local features of MOC meet the features of GPU quite well. In this paper, we propose and verify a GPU implementation of MOC on a single chip for more efficient simulations of hydraulic transients. Details of GPU-MOC parallel strategies are introduced, and the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are verified by simulating the benchmark single pipe water hammer problem. The transient processes of a large scale water distribution system and a long-distance water transmission system are simulated to investigate the computing capability of the proposed method. The results show that GPU-MOC method can achieve significant performance gains, and the speedup ratios are up to hundreds compared to the traditional method. This preliminary work demonstrates that GPU-MOC parallel computing has great prospects in practical applications with large computing load.

An Overview of the Numerical Approaches to Water Hammer Modelling: The Ongoing Quest for Practical and Accurate Numerical Approaches

“…Griebel et al [164] simulated three-dimensional multiphase flows on multiple GPUs. Meng et al [165] successfully completed parallel integration of the MOC with GPUs, thus confirming its attractiveness for this application.…”

Features and Control of Submerged Horizontal Vortex in Stepped Dissipation Wells

“…Subtracting the two red critical curves, a possibility distribution under different discharges is shown as the right half part in Figure 13, where the red On the other hand, in long stepped pipeline systems, the entrapped air is undesirable because the two-phase flow is likely to be harmful including local air retention and cavitation [31]. In these situations, the stepped wells can help release the entrapped air and reduce the intensity of the water hammer by cutting long pressured pipelines apart [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. These strategies have to be studied with the goal of preventing submerged horizontal vortices [40].…”

Distributed and vectorized method of characteristics for fast transient simulations in water distribution systems

“…In the context of WDSs, several works have demonstrated that parallel transient models can accelerate the MOC providing a better balance between computational performance and accuracy. Meng, Cheng, Wu, Yang, Zhu, et al (2019a) proposed the GPU-MOC method to accurately solve the transient model for single pipes using parallel computing. The GPU-MOC method computes the discrete MOC equations in parallel using GPUs.…”

“…Furthermore, it is unclear how scalable the GPU-MOC algorithm is for realistic WDSs, since the size of the problem may exceed the capacity of a GPU block, which is common when having large-scale networks with thousands of pipes and boundary conditions. Additionally, by focusing on the computations of single-pipe equations, parallel implementations of MOC, such as the ones developed by Meng, Cheng, Wu, Yang, Zhu, et al (2019a) and Meng, Cheng, Wu, Yang, Shang, et al (2019b), overlook the deeper problem of computing transient flow equations with boundary conditions. Computing boundary conditions is not only inherent to the transient flow problem in WDSs, but also critical to ensure scalability.…”