Hydrodynamic Engine – Introduction

You can run hydrodynamic 2-dimensional surface flow simulations from SCALGO Live using the hydrodynamic add-on. You can initiate a simulation from a workspace, and the results are delivered as a modelspace where you can easily explore, download and share the output.

Note that we have not yet released the add-on module in all countries, please contact us if you have questions about availability.

Initiating a hydrodynamic simulation

When you want to run a hydrodynamic 2D simulation of surface water flows in a workspace, you go to the pane “More” in the workspace toolbox and press “Run hydrodynamic engine…”

Find the "run hydrodynamic engine" option in the "More" tap of the workspace dialog.

This opens a new window with options regarding the rain input to the simulation. Currently, the menu allows you to select one or more predefined rain events from a list that is set up for your organization (hence you need to speak to the SCALGO Live administrator in your organization if you need other rain events). If you hover your mouse over the “i” icon next to a rain event you can see key specifications of the rain event.


Information for the 5-year return period event.

Furthermore, by clicking on the cogwheel, you can specify the length of the time step for saving results (this does not influence the simulation time step) and the total length of the simulation.

Simulation configuration options.

Progress information and looking at the result

While the computation is running a progress bar is shown to indicate how far the computation has progressed. If you want to cancel the running command, you can do that from this progress bar. Note that your hydrodynamic computations take a great deal longer than regular workspace computations and that other users in your organizations might be using all your available GPU/TUFLOW resources in SCALGO Live. In such case, your job will be automatically queued and started when the resources become available.  You can follow the progress of your job, and whether it's waiting for other jobs from users in your organization, by looking at the progress information in the right sidebar.

Two GPU jobs are queued,  using the same GPU/TUFLOW license. If other users had started hydrodynamic computations you would be able to see them in this list as well.

As explained earlier, the result is delivered as a modelspace. The computation processes your rain events one by one, and they will appear in your modelspace as they are finished. Thus you will be able to see the result from some time steps before the full computation is finished.

If you want a deeper understanding of how we setup the hydrodynamic model you can proceed to the next section of this manual.