Coastal regions are becoming increasingly populated and industrialized, with nearly one-third of humanity residing within 100 kilometres of the coast.
This demographic trend poses dual challenges: heightened vulnerability to climate-induced phenomena such as sea level rise and extreme weather events, and intensified pressure on marine ecosystems from human activities.
Addressing these challenges necessitates sophisticated ocean modelling that can connect large-scale atmospheric and oceanic changes with their direct impacts on coastal communities.
The ocean model SLIM developed at UCLouvain (Belgium, www.slim-ocean.be) is one of the leading multiscale ocean models.
This project aims to deploy SLIM across extensive coastal areas, employing high-resolution detail where needed, by harnessing parallel GPU-compute architectures.
Preliminary benchmarks indicate potential for more than a hundredfold increase in speed and robust scaling across up to 128 GPU cores.
This enhancement will dramatically expand SLIM's utility, enabling us to explore previously infeasible problems and applications, thus offering new insights into the reciprocal effects of ocean processes and human activities on marine environments and coastal infrastructures.
Emmanuel Hanert, UCLouvain - Belgium