1st DualSPHysics Users Workshop

On 8-9 September 2015, the 1st DualSPHysics Users Workshop was held at the University of Manchester in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE). Using the CUDA programming framework, DualSPHysics has been developed jointly with the Universidade de Vigo (Spain), the University of Manchester (UK) and collaborators at the University of Parma (Italy), Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Flanders Hydraulics (Belgium). As an open source and freely available SPH software package using graphics processing units (GPUs) DualSPHysics puts the power of mini-supercomputers in the hands of engineers using SPH in industry (Crespo et al. 2015).

Since its release in 2011, the DualSPHysics software has been downloaded 1000s of times (www.dual.sphysics.org). With dedicated pre- and post-processing tools allowing intuitive use of input files and examination of the simulation results, DualSPHysics is now widely used around the world both in academia and industry.

Until now however, much of the code’s developments and applications were decided solely by the development team. The 1 st DualSPHysics Users workshop has changed that. For 2-days, 35 people attended the workshop swapping experiences in their use of the code, identifying features and functionalities needed to be developed for the future. With industrial and university delegates coming from as far as South Korea, Brazil and Malaysia, the event was a truly international meeting of SPH users and developers.

Day 1 opened with talks describing the history of DualSPHysics, and the structure of the code by Dr George Fourtakas, and new state-of- the-art developments on variable resolution and boundary conditions by Dr Renato Vacondio. This was followed by two sessions of presentations on applications and new code development of DualSPHysics by users.

Figure1

Figure 1 - Mashy Green of Imperial College London presenting and discussing boundary conditions in DualSPHysics

In the final session, Dr Tim Lanfear from NVIDIA talk provided an insight into their future strategy of development for acceleration devices such as GPUs (see Figure 2). Day 1 finished with a discussion session and an evening meal discussing all things SPH and DualSPHysics related (see Figure 3), including multi-phase flow.

Day 2 continued with talks of new developments by the developers of multi-phase features scheduled to appear in version 5 of DualSPHysics including air- water by Dr Athanasios Mokos, water-sediment by Dr George Fourtakas and the coupling of DualSPHysics with the discrete element method (DEM) by Dr Ricardo Canelas. To finish the workshop, Dr Jose Dominguez provided an insight into the optimisation that accelerates DualSPHysics on GPUs followed by Dr Anxo Barreiro on pre- and post-processing.

With the success of the first workshop, the 2 nd DualSPHysics Users Workshop is already planned for 13-14 September 2016.

Figure2

Figure 2 - Dr Tim Lanfear of NVIDIA explaining their plans for future developments for scientific computing and SPH

Day 1: Tuesday 8 September 2015

9:45-10:15 Welcome & Opening lecture on SPH [PDF] Dr Benedict Rogers*
10:15-11:00 Structure of the DualSPHysics code [PDF] Dr José Dominguez*
Dr George Fourtakas*
11:00-11:20 Coffee Beak  
11:20-12:00 Current Developments:
Boundary Conditions, Variable Resolution, Applications [PDF]
Dr Renato Vacondio*
12:00-13:00 Session 1: Delegate Presentations  
  Modelling tsunami bore impact on structures using DualSPHysics Gede Pringgana, University of Manchester
  Comparative Studies on Numerical Simulation of Tsunami Surge [PDF] M.Hafiz Aslami, City University
  A laboratory-DualSPHysics modelling approach to support landslide-tsunami hazard assessment [PDF] Valentin Heller, University of Nottingham
13:00-14:30 Lunch  
14:30-15:30 Session 2: Delegate Presentations  
  Stability prediction of a floating wind power system by using smoothed particle hydrodynamics Hyuncheol Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Enhanced DualSPHysics Performance on Xeon and Xeon Phi [PDF] Sergi Siso, Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
  Fixed ghost particles boundary conditions in DualSPHysics [PDF] Mashy Hazan, Imperial College
15:30-16:00 NVIDIA GPU developments and the future for SPH and DualSPHysics Dr Tim Lanfear
NVIDIA
16:00-16:30 Coffee & Tea Break  
16:30-17:30 DualSPHysics Question Time  
19:00 Workshop Dinner  

Day 2: Wednesday 9 September 2015

9:30-10:30 Current Developments: Multi-phase, DEM
[PDF] [PDF] [PDF]
Dr George Fourtakas*
Dr Athanasios Mokos*
Ricardo Canelas*
10:30-11:15 Optimisation and SPH Tricks [PDF] Dr José Dominguez*
10:15-11:45 Coffee Beak  
11:45-12:30 Current Developments:
Pre- and Post-Processing
Anxo Barreiro*

Figure3

Figure 3 - The evening meal discussing all things SPH related

References

Crespo, A.J.C., Dominguez, J.M., Rogers, B.D., Gomez-Gesteira, M., Longshaw, S.M., Canelas, R., Vacondio, R., Barreiro, A., Garcia-Feal, O. (2015) “DualSPHysics: Open-source parallel CFD solver based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)”. Computer Physics Communications. Vol. 187. pp 204-216. February. DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2014.10.004

Acknowledgements to M. Hafiz Aslami for photos