A paper presenting the operational modeling chain and a real case application has been published in the Atmosphere journal.
Download the paper from Atmosphere.
The utilization of advanced models for simulating pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere during emergency situations (such as industrial accidents or 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 for rapid 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 to accelerate numerical calculation and optimize energy resources while minimizing infrastructure costs. The research activity is focused on the feasibility of complete or hybrid parallelization of an advanced atmospheric dispersion model in order to exploit the new capabilities 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 utilized. This model is 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 participating as a Research Organization (RO) in the project. A second RO, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Torino, contributes by selecting the most suitable technologies and assisting the code porting to GPU. Arpa Piemonte assumes the role of End-User and is involved in designing the use cases, refining the definition of the most valuable application features and selecting the test episodes and evaluating the results.