Asier Lacasta has presented on 27th Jan 2017 his PhD tesis entitled “On the Efficient Implementation of Numerical Solvers for the Simulation and Control of Shallow Flows on GPUs”
The PhD thesis was supervised by Pilar García-Navarro and Pilar Brufau and the evaluation commitee was composed by Javier Murillo, Reinaldo García and Ignacio Villanueva.
The work is focused on the design, development and verification of a GPU based computational technique for the simulation and control of the two dimensional shallow water equations. These equations are widely used for modeling free-surface phenomena and they usually require an important computational effort to be solved in practical cases. Traditionally, this effort has been reduced by means of large computational facilities with many computational processing units. The Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are computing devices which contain a large number of smaller computing elements that, adequately programmed, can perform the same computations as the common CPU units in less time. Thanks to this advance, the simulation tools become attractive also for inverse design purposes. The Shallow Water Equations (SWE) have been traditionally used for forecasting and predictive purposes, but the reduction in computational effort can be used for changing the perspective of their application. In this work, an adjoint based mathematical model is developed and implemented on GPUs. Its application in the one dimensional and two dimensional mathematical model has demonstrated that it can be a useful tool for recovering missing information as well as for control purposes.
We warmly congratulate our colleague Asier for his PhD with honors and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors!!