High-Performance Computing Benchmarking for Coastal Hydrodynamic Modelling Using Delft3D Flexible Mesh

High-resolution coastal hydrodynamic models are used increasingly to measure and support environmental assessment, crisis mitigation, and forecasting. Yet, these models become constrained by the computing resources available to them resulting in lower-grade results. High-Performance Computing (HPC) thus becomes essential to increase simulation speeds while maintaining high resolutions. In this study, we present a benchmarking of resource configurations for a coastal hydrodynamic model using Delft3DFM Flexible Mesh (D-Flow FM), utilizing HPC resources while focusing on parallel performance, scalability, and efficiency. Benchmarking experiments were run while comparing two MPI libraries, MPICH and Intel MPI, across multiple CPU core counts and partition combinations on both two-dimensional and three-dimensional model configurations, including barotropic and baroclinic configurations. The results showcase how varied the runtime performance becomes depending on the hydrodynamic configuration, MPI implementation, and HPC parallel partition, and how HPC hardware can affect which combination is best. The goal is to provide guidance on finding optimal HPC configurations, including resource allocation and MPI library use, when running coastal hydrodynamic models of high resolution and quality.