Non-profit research organization RAND Corporation and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have hosted a joint workshop that facilitated the analysis of water management strategies through high-performance computer simulations.
LLNL said Thursday workshop participants used supercomputer simulations to test water management portfolios such as conservation, groundwater and seawater desalination and water reuse against climate change scenarios and development patterns.
Fred Streitz, director of LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center, said the exercise worked to demonstrate how RAND’s analytics methods and LLNL’s supercomputing capacity can aid decision-making and policymaking on water management.
Ed Balkovich, RAND senior information scientist, noted that participants performed approximately 60,000 simulations within 45 minutes, which he said would have taken 14 days in 2012.
Workshop participants included entities that were involved in RAND’s 2012 study of the Colorado River Basin, LLNL said.
The workshop is part of the LLNL/RAND Partnership for Computational Policy Analysis that seeks to address public policy and national security challenges through the integration of computing technologies with analytics methods, the lab added.
