Groundwater Vistas & Pest Webinar

The next model calibration Webinar will held from November 8 through 19. This Webinar is focused on using Groundwater Vistas and PEST to calibrate groundwater flow and transport models. You can get additional information at our web site (www.groundwatermodels.com - click the Webinar button).

Two new topics will be covered in the November webinar. The first is a detailed discussion BeoPest, the newest version of Pest. BeoPest replaces Parallel Pest and allows users to connect computers in different locations, including cloud servers. We recently tested BeoPest by using computers in the USA and Australia on the same Pest run. As part of the BeoPest lecture, we will also cover the use of GoGrid cloud servers in Pest simulations.

The second new feature is a guest lecture by John Doherty, the author of Pest. John will discuss the latest developments in the Pest technology and share his thoughts on the philosophy of model calibration and uncertainty analysis.

Experiences with BeoPest and GoGrid Cloud Servers

I have had a chance recently to work with BeoPest and GoGrid cloud servers. BeoPest is the latest version of Pest that replaces parallel pest, allowing you to more easily connect multiple computers in the same pest run. It is much easier to use than parallel pest and works by using TCP/IP. The latter means that computers do not need to be in the same location. I recently tested this with John Doherty (author of Pest) where the master run was here in Pennsylvania and several slaves were running on John's computers in Australia. It worked flawlessly.

I am also now using GoGrid.com's cloud servers to run slave runs with BeoPest. It is fairly economical if you just need lots of computers for short time periods. I have been using Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) servers with 4 Gb of RAM. This gets you 4 processors on each server so you can run 4 separate slave runs on each one. I found the GoGrid.com servers to be extremely fast and have not had one go down yet. They are virtually the same speed as my newest Alienware Area-51 workstations that use the new Intel 6-core i7, overclocked at 3.6 Ghz. That is pretty amazing speed. Cost for each server is $18.24 per day, which is $4.56 per day per slave run. That amounts to about 200 days of slave runs to pay off an Alienware workstation. Since most Pest runs are intensive for short periods, it makes sense to use these cloud servers.

A Note on Windows 7

We are getting a lot of emails on Windows 7 compatibility and our software. All of our products (Groundwater Vistas, Winflow, and AquiferWin32) work fine under both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. There are a couple of things to note, though:

- We use WinHelp format help files. Windows 7 does not automatically install that but you can download it from the Microsoft Web page. Actually when you try to access help for the first time, Windows 7 tells you the problem and directs you to the download area, so that is easy to solve.

- There are some occasions when Groundwater Vistas gets stuck continually refreshing the screen. This only seems to happen when screen refresh takes a long time (e.g. lots of large maps and other things to draw). You can stop this by maximizing another window over top the Groundwater Vistas window and waiting a few seconds. When you go back to Vistas, it will be fine. Let us know if you encounter this - so far it seems fairly rare.

Latest Groundwater Vistas Changes

The last few months got away from me. It's been a long time since I posted to my blog so I'll start getting caught up by listing the changes to Groundwater Vistas Version 5 since my last post.

Enhancements

Additional options under ae|modify|well|flow rates
Added option to animate particle movement (File|Export Animation)
Added seawat2000 drain option
Made transient hsu report
Additional particle export options
Added RMS error to calibration stats.
Mass Balance hydrograph on current hsu can graph contributions from adjacent hsu's
Recharge multiplier by hsu zone range
Export mnw/fwl stuff to well shapefile
Turn on/off well names based on being selected
Import segmented et data
Export dry/flooded cells when exporting cell/nodal results
Add x,y to dry and flooded cell reports
Support fwl5 package in mass balance
New "add" option on props|import|matrix (add imported matrix to current property)
Option to not write out data from Stress Periods with zero rates in AE wells export
Dry cell report now lists dry wells
Added IBS to mass balance (addition to storage term)
Support for Leapfrom Hydro 3D Geologic modeling
Added support for Surfact TMP1 package (change Kx, Kz, Ss, Sy with time)
Added automatic renumbering of pilot points
Added prior info to mf2k pes package
Added plot|file operations|mean-stddev to compute mean of a range of stress periods

Bugs Fixed

Needed to add KMAKR to pestgv.bat file for "krige by layer"
Fill in gaps pilot point routine did not work with multiple layers.
Plot|Next time step was not working with surfact mixed steady and transient periods
Lake conductance for LPF changed in concept, with support for legacy models
Cross-section color flood problems fixed
Problem identified in mt3d with 1000 rows
Problem estimating ET extinction depth with pest when ET rate is constant
Polyline transient problems fixed
Seawat/mt3d unit numbers (added 200) due to conflict with pilotpoints
Do not put targets/wells in dxf export if not drawn on the screen
Transient target missing last time value in shapefile import
If nlay is exactly 200, laycon array has one extra line in it
Bug in exporting transient streams to ascii file
Bug in writing kz.tpl for surfact when estimating kz & writing kz to bcf package
GWM testing complete with several bugs fixed
Bcs|import|text not whiting out duplicates in same cell
Polyline was not saving bottom layer number
Fixed some problems importing pcn file from surfact
Gw3d had problems with ato package in Surfact