A New Saint-Venant Solver for SWMM

Abstract

The next generation of the public domain Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) code needs to be able to effectively use parallelization of 1000+ threads for high-resolution simulation of large urban drainage systems. We propose a new explicit solution technique using a “no-neighbour” finite-volume algorithm. A no-neighbour algorithm is strictly limited in the design of its time/space discretization stencil to limit the communication bandwidth issues that typically cause codes to lose efficiency when applied over large numbers of parallel threads. Returning SWMM to an explicit solver creates a number of challenges for implementing the solution technique, but also raises some new possibilities for how the model can be used. In this work, we briefly describe the proposed algorithm and examine its performance in simulating a steep urban stream.