Development of a three-dimensional groundwater flow model for Western Melton Valley: Application of P-FEM on a DOE waste site

Modeling the movement of hazardous waste in groundwater was identified by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as one of the grand challenges in scientific computation. In recognition of this need, DOE has provided support for a group of scientists from several national laboratories and universities to conduct research and development in groundwater flow and contaminant transport modeling. This group is part of a larger consortium of researchers, collectively referred to as the Partnership in Computational Science (PICS), that has been charged with the task of applying high-performance computational tools and techniques to grand challenge areas identified by DOE. One of the goals of the PICS Groundwater Group is to develop a new three-dimensional groundwater flow and transport code that is optimized for massively parallel computers. An existing groundwater flow code, 3DFEMWATER, was parallelized in order to serve as a benchmark for these new models. The application of P-FEM, the parallelized version of 3DFEMWATER, to a real field site is the subject of this report.