Open call for a master course in High Performance Computing applied to Hydrological Modeling.

Dear all, I would like to advertise an unique opportunity for bright and motivated young people interested in both hydrology and learn on high-performance scientific computing.

The HPC-Tres program (see http://www.ogs.trieste.it/it/content/hpc-training-and-research-earth-sciences-hpc-tres) is just ready to open a call four (4) fellowship to attend the master in HPC (www.mhpc.it) and work on a thesis on earth science computational project.

One of these four project is dedicated to the development of high-performance parallel code for hydrological modelling, thanks to the cooperation among EURAC Bolzano www.eurac.edu , OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e Geofisica Sperimentale http://www.ogs.trieste.it/) and MHPC Master in High Scientific Computing http://www.mhpc.it/).

This is a great chance for a young graduated student to become an HPC professional and at the same time give an important contribution to advanced scientific packages.
One of the goals of the thesis is to make the hydrological model GEOtop (see also here) run in parallel and increase its speed and overall performance. See “Line C7. Development of a High Performance hydrological model” in the attached document.

To apply for the fellowship is mandatory to apply to the MHPC as well

Deadline has been updated to the 17 of July, see here: http://www.mhpc.it/how-apply

Please do not hesitate to contact Giacomo Bertoldi giacomo.bertoldi@eurac.edu for any further information on this.

Please circulate this opportunity among young and motivated collaborators interested in spending 12 month between Trieste and Bolzano fully paid to attend the master and work on HPC hydrological modelling.

Ing. Giacomo Bertoldi, Ph.D.

EURAC research

Istituto per l'ambiente alpino

Viale Druso 1, I-39100 Bolzano


t +39 0471 055 314
f +39 0471 055 399


Line C7. Development of a High Performance hydrological model


The GEOtop hydrological scientific package is an integrated hydrological model that simulates the heat and water budgets at and below the soil surface. It describes the three-dimensional water flow in the soil and the energy exchange with the atmosphere, considering the radiative and turbulent fluxes. Furthermore, it reproduces the highly non-linear interactions between the water and energy balance during soil freezing and thawing, and simulates the temporal evolution of snow cover, soil temperature and moisture. The core components of the package were presented in the 2.0 version (Endrizzi et al, 2014), which was released as Free Software Open-source project. However, despite the high scientific quality of the project, a modern software engineering approach was still missing. Such weakness hindered its scientific potential and its use both as a standalone package and, more importantly, in an integrate way with other hydrological software tools. In this research line we ail to concentrate software re - engineering efforts to create a robust and stable parallel scientific software package open to the hydrological community, easily usable by researchers and experts, and interoperable with other packages. The overall goal of the activity is to eventually reach a robust and stable software project that manages in a flexible way a complex state-of-the-art hydrological model like GEOtop and integrates it into wider workflows.