Comparison of Shallow Water Solvers: Applications for Dam-Break and Tsunami Cases with Reordering Strategy for Efficient Vectorization on Modern Hardware

Abstract

We investigate in this paper the behaviors of the Riemann solvers (Roe and Harten-Lax-van Leer-Contact (HLLC) schemes) and the Riemann-solver-free method (central-upwind scheme) regarding their accuracy and efficiency for solving the 2D shallow water equations. Our model was devised to be spatially second-order accurate with the Monotonic Upwind Scheme for Conservation Laws (MUSCL) reconstruction for a cell-centered finite volume scheme—and be temporally fourth-order accurate using the Runge–Kutta fourth-order method. Four benchmark cases of dam-break and tsunami events dealing with highly-discontinuous flows and wet–dry problems were simulated. To this end, we applied a reordering strategy for the data structures in our code supporting efficient vectorization and memory access alignment for boosting the performance. Two main features are pointed out here. Firstly, the reordering strategy employed has enabled highly-efficient vectorization for the three solvers investigated on three modern hardware (AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512), where speed-ups of 4.5–6.5× were obtained on the AVX/AVX2 machines for eight data per vector while on the AVX-512 machine we achieved a speed-up of up to 16.7× for 16 data per vector, all with singe-core computation; with parallel simulations, speed-ups of up to 75.7–121.8× and 928.9× were obtained on AVX/AVX2 and AVX-512 machines, respectively. Secondly, we observed that the central-upwind scheme was able to outperform the HLLC and Roe schemes 1.4× and 1.25×, respectively, by exhibiting similar accuracies. This study would be useful for modelers who are interested in developing shallow water codes.