Since the end of 2017, Deltares has been cooperating with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on the MODFLOW source code.  

Deltares has been commissioned by the USGS to the parallelization of the open-source computational code MODFLOW 6. Therefore, a parallel prototype of MODFLOW 6 was developed and since 2018 this is the main development code in the PhD project of Jarno Verkaik, where the computational limits of high-resolution groundwater modeling are explored. The plan is to release an official USGS parallel version of MODFLOW 6 in 2022.

The experiments of parallelization show that significant accelerations in computation time can be achieved and that the MODFLOW 6 calculation core is basically suitable for very large, high-resolution, groundwater models.

Another example of cooperation is implementation of the Basic Modelling Interface into the modelcode of MODFLOW 6, which enables to coupling to other models and other modeling domains. The BMI coupling has successfully been applied to the model for the unsaturated zone for the Netherlands.  

Links:

• Development page of modflow6-parallel on GitHub
• MODFLOW-USGS wiki page of MODFLOW 6
• Abstract: High performance computing with PCR-GLOBWB (AGU conference Dec 2021)
• Development page of Deltares' imod_coupler on GitHub