Nederlands
Developing a fast (fast-time) solver for large sparse matrices for MARIN

Elwin van 't Wout

Site of the project:
MARIN
Haagsteeg 2
6708 PM Wageningen

start of the project: November 2008

In February 2009 the Interim Thesis has appeared and a presentation has been given.

The Master project has been finished in August 2009 by the completion of the Masters Thesis and a final presentation has been given.

Finally the research is contained in the book European Success Stories in Industrial Mathematics. For working address etc. we refer to our alumnipage.

Summary of the master project:
MARIN (Maritime Research Institute Netherlands) provides ship manoeuvring simulators that offer a variety of maritime operations for virtually every type of ship and of propulsion. The current computation model for the wave field is based on cosine wave spectra, that are converted to time signals through Fourier transformation. This has the benefit of being deterministic in time and place and therefore is easy to implement on our distributed simulation systems. However, this model is not interactive, that is diffraction, reflection, refraction and depth dependency are not taken into account. From a visualization point of view, this model is limited too. Better visualization models (in e.g. Waterworld, Titanic, Perfect Storm) lack physical realism.

MARIN wishes to use the so-called Variational Boussinesq Model to compute and visualize the wave field. This physically realistic model does provide interaction with objects, diffraction, reflection etc. At this moment, the model can be used for computing a wave field of 500m by 500m (i.e., 10000 points) in real-time. To be useful in our manoeuvring simulator, a much larger wave field of at least 5km by 5km (1000000 points) must be computed in real time.

Part of this Variational Boussinesq Model is a CG sparse matrix solver. The purpose of the work will be to speed up the current solver or develop another (super)fast one for this kind of large matrices. Possibilities include a parallell iterative CG method, a Box Multi-grid method or implementation of a solver on the GPU by means of CUDA. CUDA.

Location The work will be conducted at MARIN in Wageningen. MARIN has been an independent and innovative service provider for the maritime sector worldwide for more that 75 years now. The research is carried out by model tests in large basins and by lots of computer simulations.






Above: the progression of a small wave coming from the left in a small area, with a hollow (bottom left), a small harbour (bottom right) and a small beach (top right).

Contact information: Kees Vuik

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