Resources
We have produced a range of high-performance modelling and informatics tools for predicting floods and other natural hazards and assessing their risks, including our flagship High-Performance Integrated hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS).
A selection of our models, including HiPIMS, are available for research use with open-source codes ready for download. We also welcome contributions to model development via the collaborative platform Github.
HiPIMS
HiPIMS solves the fully 2D shallow water equations using a shock-capturing Godunov-type finite volume numerical scheme and is implemented on multiple GPUs to achieve high-performance computing. HiPIMS is built on the robust numerical methods that have been continuously developed and tested for over two decades. A brief history of HiPIMS is also available.
HiPIMS-OCL
Developed using the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) framework, HiPIMS-OCL is a suite of tools designed to run on a range of modern computing platforms including CPUs, GPUs and distributed systems (MPI). The model has been widely applied to simulate river, tidal and pluvial (direct rainfall) flooding over large areas such as a city or region. More detailed introduction about HiPIMS-OCL and its source code can be accessed below.
Key references for HiPIMS-OCL:
- Smith LS, Liang Q (2013) Towards a generalised GPU/CPU shallow-flow modelling tool. Computers & Fluids, 88: 334-343.
- Liang Q, Smith LS (2015) A high-performance integrated hydrodynamic modelling system for urban flood simulations. Journal of Hydroinformatics, 17(4): 518-533. (The name of HiPIMS first publicly adopted).
HiPIMS-CUDA
HiPIMS-CUDA is implemented with novel numerical methods for stable and efficient simulation of overland flows and rapidly varying flooding processes. It is developed using the widely adopted CUDA framework to take advantage of the high-performance computing power of multiple GPUs to support high-resolution simulation or forecasting of flooding and the associated processes across an entire catchment or city that involves hundreds of millions of computational cells. A user-friendly Python-based toolkit has also been developed for data pre-processing and result visualisation. The user manual and the source code of HiPIMS-CUDA can be accessed from the repository on Github.
Key references for HiPIMS-CUDA:
- Xia X, Liang Q, Ming X (2019) A full-scale fluvial flood modelling framework based on a High-Performance Integrated hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS). Advances in Water Resources, 132, 103392,
- Xia X, Liang Q (2018) A new efficient implicit scheme for discretising the stiff friction terms in the shallow water equations. Advances in Water Resources, 117, 87-97,
- Xia X, Liang Q, Ming X, Hou J (2017) An efficient and stable hydrodynamic model with novel source term discretization schemes for overland flow and flood simulations. Water Resources Research, 53, 3730-3759.
HiPIMS- Torch
HiPIMS-Torch uses state-of-art numerical schemes to solve the 2D shallow water equations to handle complex domain topography and wetting and drying to achieve stable and accurate prediction of complex flooding dynamics from multiple sources. To support large-scale high-resolution flood simulations, it is implemented on multiple GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) using CUDA/C++ languages to achieve high-performance computing. It is developed by adopting PyTorch (https://pytorch.org) to distribute GPU threads and reconstruct input data and internal variables, making it easier for interfacing with GIS tools and data pre- and post-processing.
Key references for HiPIMS-Torch
- Zhao J, Liang Q (2022) Novel variable reconstruction and friction term discretisation schemes for hydrodynamic modelling of overland flow and surface water flooding. Advances in Water Resources, 163: 104187.
- Tong X, Liang Q, Zhao J (2023) A high-performance integrated hydrodynamic modelling framework for large-scale multi-process simulation. EGU 2023, abstract only.