A parallel software development for watershed simulations

Abstract

A watershed software application is designed to model a coupled system of multiple physics on multiple domains. Tremendous computational resources are required to integrate the system equations on large spatial domains with multiple temporal scales among them. Supported by the Department of Defense Common High Performance Computing Software Initiative, the parallel WASH123D software development aims to efficiently simulate one aspect (i.e., soil and land) of the battlespace environment. Currently, the coupled two-dimensional overland and three-dimensional subsurface flows have been completed. Different numerical approaches are implemented to solve different components of the coupled system. The parallelization of such a complex system is developed on an IT-based approach - modular, hierarchical model construction, portable, scalable, and embedded parallel computational tools development and integration. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the successful implementation of the parallel algorithms. Detailed profiling is also provided to show the imposed light-weight communication overhead. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.