Simulating 3D Sand Wave Recovery After Pre-sweeping by Delft3D FM

Sand wave is one of the large-scale seabed morphological features with a typical wave height of metres and a wavelength of hundreds of metres. Its mobile nature causes a nuisance to offshore infrastructure and marine transport. Pre-sweeping is a construction procedure commonly involved in submarine utilities installation to dredge existing sand...

High-Performance and Scalable Agent-Based Simulation with BioDynaMo

Agent-based modeling plays an essential role in gaining insights into biology, sociology, economics, and other fields. However, many existing agent-based simulation platforms are not suitable for large-scale studies due to the low performance of the underlying simulation engines. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel high...

Hardware Acceleration of High-Performance Computational Flow Dynamics Using High-Bandwidth Memory-Enabled Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Scientific computing is at the core of many High-Performance Computing applications, including computational flow dynamics. Because of the utmost importance to simulate increasingly larger computational models, hardware acceleration is receiving increased attention due to its potential to maximize the performance of scientific computing....

Spatial and temporal relation between drinking water temperature and indicators for microbial water quality in the drinking water distribution system of Amsterdam

Intensive urbanisation enhances warming of cities’ ambient and subsoil environment. The local drinking water distribution system (DWDS) is likewise affected. Hotspots of anthropogenic heating were perceived to influence drinking water temperature and pose a threat for microbial drinking water quality. Information on temporal and spatial relation...

Time-Adaptive Grid Hydrological Solver Using PETSc

A high-resolution hydrological solver that solves on time-adaptive grids is created. The solver uses h-refinement strategies which adapts the resolution of the grid using a posteriori measure. It is based on an open-source scientific computing library named PETSc. With the use of highly scalable time-stepping solvers provided by PETSc, an...

Arrow Prefetching: Prefetching Techniques for High Performance Big Data Processors using the Apache Arrow Data Format

As the digitisation of the world progresses at an accelerating pace, an overwhelming quantity of data from a variety of sources, of different types, organised in a multitude of forms or not at all, are subjected into diverse analytic processes for specific kinds of value to be extracted out of them. The aggregation of these analytic processes...

FlexHH: A flexible hardware library for Hodgkin-Huxley-based neural simulations

In the field of computational neuroscience, complex mathematical models are used to replicate brain behavior with the goal of understanding the biological processes involved. The simulation of such models are computationally expensive and therefore, in recent years, high-performance computing systems have been identified as a possible solution...

Faster than the Speed of Life: Accelerating Developmental Biology Simulations with GPUs and FPGAs

Life scientists are faced with the tough challenge of developing high-performance computer simulations of their increasingly complex models. BioDynaMo is an open-source biological simulation platform that aims to alleviate them from the intricacies that go into development. Life scientists are able to base their models on top of BioDynaMo’s...

Feeding High-Bandwidth Streaming-Based FPGA Accelerators

A new class of accelerator interfaces has signi cant implications on system architecture. An order of magnitude more bandwidth forces us to reconsider FPGA design. OpenCAPI is a new interconnect standard that enables attaching FPGAs coherently to a high-bandwidth, low- latency interface. Keeping up with this bandwidth poses new challenges for...

Exploring HPC and Big Data Convergence: A Graph Processing Study on Intel Knights Landing

The question 'Can big data and HPC infrastructure converge?' has important implications for many operators and clients of modern computing. However, answering it is challenging. The hardware is currently different, and fast evolving: big data uses machines with modest numbers of fat cores per socket, large caches, and much memory, whereas HPC...

BrainFrame: A node-level heterogeneous accelerator platform for neuron simulations

Objective. The advent of high-performance computing (HPC) in recent years has led to its increasing use in brain studies through computational models. The scale and complexity of such models are constantly increasing, leading to challenging computational requirements. Even though modern HPC platforms can often deal with such challenges, the...

Viscoelastic stress modeling in cementitious materials using constant viscoelastic hydration modulus

Viscoelastic stress modeling in ageing cementitious materials is of major importance in high performance concrete of low water cement ratio (e.g. w/c ~0.35) where crack resistance due to deformation restraint needs to be determined. Total stress analysis is complicated by the occurrence of internal stresses due to shrinkage, which requires...

High-speed parallel processing on CUDA-enabled Graphics Processing Units

A new trend in computing is the use of multi-core processors and the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for general purpose high speed parallel computing. Therefore TNO wants to respond to the current trend of parallel computing and wants to investigate on which architectures they want to apply and parallelize their applications on. This...

Development of a workload set for multi-core architectures

With the rise of multi-core chips in commodity hardware, the need for specialized workloads to evaluate the performance of multi-core systems has become apparent. The current generation of workloads used for evaluating multi-core systems often consist of sequential programs not capable of running on multiple processors and are therefore of...

Automatic parallelization of finite element CFD code using HPC middleware

Computational fluid analysis requires huge amounts of computational resources. However, for the usual developer, parallelization is difficult as it requires special programming skills. In this study, the “HPC Middleware” is employed, which supports parallelization and optimizations for easily developing parallel code. The parallel efficiency of...

An Advanced Collaborative Infrastructure for the Real-Time Computational Steering of Large CFD Simulations

using graphical means, in certain cases it is even possible to alter parameters of the computation whilst it is running, depending on what the scientist sees in the current visual output. This ability to monitor and change parameters of the computational process at any time and from anywhere is called computational steering. By combining this...

The influence of the connection characteristics on the seismic performance of precast concrete structures

Objective of the thesis is the study of the influence of the connection characteristics on the seismic performance of precast concrete structures. To that end a six storey high building with moment resisting frame was analyzed and designed. The precast concrete building consists of 3x6m span frames at 7.8m centre-to-centre in the transverse...