Parallel simulation of groundwater flow in the North China Plain

Numerical modeling is of crucial importance in understanding the behavior of regional groundwater system. However, the demand on modeling capability is intensive when performing high-resolution simulation over long time span. This paper presents the application of a parallel program to speed up the detailed modeling of the groundwater flow system in the North China Plain. The parallel program is implemented by rebuilding the well-known MODFLOW program on our parallel-computing framework, which is achieved by designing patch-based parallel data structures and algorithms but maintaining the compute flow and functionalities of MODFLOW. The detailed model with more than one million grids and a decade of time has been solved. The parallel simulation results were examined against the field observed data and these two data are generally in good agreement. For the comparison on solution time, the parallel program running on 32 cores is 6 times faster than the fastest MICCG-based MODFLOW program and 11 times faster than the GMG-based MODFLOW program. Therefore, remarkable computational time can be saved when using the parallel program, which facilitates the rapid modeling and prediction of the groundwater flow system in the North China Plain.