Seamlessly integrated with Flood Modeller, Flood Cloud is an innovative service that enables you to run your model simulations in the cloud. It empowers users to run compute-intensive simulations faster, at greater scale, and more cost effectively than ever before.
In addition to running Flood Modeller, Flood Cloud is also capable of running TUFLOW simulations at lightning speed. In this month’s tip, Rob Honeywill, Senior Developer for Flood Cloud, discusses how to pass event and scenario parameters to TUFLOW and further guidance around monitoring simulations.
A popular TUFLOW model set up is to use the -e and -s switches to manage multiple events and scenarios from a single control file. The -e and -s wildcard is replaced by entries on the command line, e.g.
"C:\TUFLOW\2018-03-AE\w64\TUFLOW_iSP_w64.exe" -e1 Q050 -e2 24hr -s1 2m -s2 Dev "C:\Tutorial_Wiki\TUFLOW\runs\M01_~e1~_~e2~_~s1~_s2~_003.tcf"
How can you do this in Flood Cloud?
If your model is a linked Flood Modeller-TUFLOW model, then nothing has changed, you will still need to edit the Flood Modeller 1D simulation (.ief file) in the simulation editor and set the wildcard values under “Run Options” in the “Links” tab:
Flood Cloud will identify these values up and use them for the simulation (and any variable substitution required).
If your model is a TUFLOW (or TUFLOW-ESTRY) model, you can enter your wildcard values directly into the Flood Cloud interface. To do this, right click on the simulation table header and select “Column Chooser”. In the box that appears, there should be an entry, “Arguments”; double click this to add as a column at the end of the table, or alternatively drag it into the position in the grid you would like it.
Next enter the wildcard values for each simulation directly into this column for each row, as below (note you will need to add the same simulation .tcf file multiple times – once for each scenario / event combination):
You are now ready to run the simulations with Flood Cloud.
You don’t have to enter these wildcard values every time you want to run the simulation. You can save the currently loaded simulations to a Flood Modeller simulation batch file (.ipf), by clicking the “Save” button. This will save the list of simulations as well as any wildcards you have specified to the file. Next time you want to run them again, choose the “Add from file” button and pick the file.
Monitoring your simulations
Once you’ve submitted your simulations you can close Flood Cloud and even shutdown your machine, picking up where you left off later. As soon as you see, the “Waiting for simulations” message, it is safe to close down Flood Cloud completely; the simulations will continue to run.
For example, you could submit a batch of runs from a desktop machine in your office, close Flood Cloud with the simulations running as below and leave for the day.
That evening you could check in on progress on a laptop or any other machines long as you have your Flood Cloud login details. If you’re not in the next day, a colleague can check the status of the simulations and download the results onto their machine.
For further information with regards to running TUFLOW in the cloud, visit the Flood Cloud website.