Cloud-based forecasting of urban water flows

Deltares is an independent non-profit institute for applied research in the field of water and subsurface. They have five areas of expertise: flood risk, environment, water and subsoil resources, delta infrastructure, and adaptive delta planning. They have developed a modelling suite, Delft3D, to tackle their challenges. One of the SMEs that use Delft3D is HKV Consultants. They provide consultancy services and conduct research in the fields of safety, drought and flood risk analyses for rivers, coasts, estuaries and urban water systems. 

Delft3D has been open source since 2011 and is used worldwide. It consists of modules for modelling hydrodynamics, waves, morphology, water quality, and ecology. However, to improve the quality of its work, HKV needed easy access to a version of Delft3D that could scale to available hardware resources in a flexible way. The objective was to develop a pilot version of Delft3D-as-a-Service (DaaS) that could run for remote use by HKV. 

The official Deltares version of Delft3D has been installed and certified at the HPC systems of SURFsara. A portal for DaaS has been developed, with a command-line interface with extended options and flexibility available for experienced users, and a simpler, web-based interface available for newer users. Delft3D has been optimized for large-scale HPC, which is necessary for the coupled modelling involving different Delft3D modules, and for the highly detailed modelling increasingly required by SMEs.