Parallelized Hydraulic and Water Quality Simulations for Water Distribution System Analysis

This paper presents the development and performance testing of the parallelization scheme for executing water distribution system analysis solvers. Using multithread computing techniques, hydraulic and water quality simulations are parallelized in two separate threads. One thread noted as H-thread is assigned to perform hydraulic simulation while the other thread noted as Q-thread is to undertake water quality analysis. Q-thread proceeds once H-thread completes the hydraulic simulation for one time step. To ensure that Q-thread consumes the correct hydraulic results for water quality analysis, both threads are synchronized such that H-thread is always ahead of Q-thread over the simulation period. The hydraulic simulation results within a dynamic time window are stored in memory, instead of writing to a temporary file, thus the parallelization scheme further streamlines the water quality analysis by eliminating the retrieval of the hydraulic results from the temporary file. The implemented parallel simulation solvers have been tested on a number of large water distribution models, the results show that consistent speedup has been achieved.