Accelerated Simulation on Heterogeneous Platforms of Incidental Releases in Atmosphere

The use of advanced models for simulating pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere during emergency situations (industrial accidents, fires) as a support for monitoring activities (correct placement of measuring instruments), communication and alerting to affected populations and emergency response planning has been limited until now due to the necessity to quickly have access to powerful computing resources and to high-resolution meteorological data.

The SAPERI (Simulation Accelerated on Heterogeneous Platforms of Release Emergencies in Atmosphere) Project aims to develop an effective, efficient, and user friendly analysis tool that can take advantage of innovative technologies for accelerating numerical calculation and using energy resources efficiently while minimizing infrastructure costs. The research activity is focused on the possibility of complete or hybrid parallelization of an advanced atmospheric dispersion model, in order to exploit the new potentialities offered by high-performance computing on GPUs and FPGAs.

For this purpose, an open-source version of the Lagrangian particle dispersion model SPRAY-WEB is used, made available for research purposes by a consortium coordinated by the Department of Sciences and Innovation Technologies of the University of Eastern Piedmont, which is involved as a Research Organization (RO) in the project. A second RO, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Torino, participates by selecting the best available technologies and accompanying the code porting to GPU. Arpa Piemonte plays the role of End-User, and is involved in designing the use cases, improving the definition of the most useful application features and in selecting the test episodes and evaluating the results.