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Parallelization, Spatial Decomposition and Load Balancing of a Single Tree Level Forest Dynamics Simulator

Artur Signell, Johan Schöring, Mats Aspnäs, Jan Westerholm, Parallelization, Spatial Decomposition and Load Balancing of a Single Tree Level Forest Dynamics Simulator. Mathematical and Computational Forestry and Natural Resource Sciences 2(1), 30–40, 2010.

Abstract:

SPATE-HPC is a single tree level forest dynamics simulator capable of simulating very large
forest areas. The size and shape of the simulation area as well as the number of trees are
only restricted by the amount of memory available and many sub areas can be used for a
tighter control of the simulation.
In this article we describe the parallelization of SPATE-HPC and its major computational
challenges. We describe the domain decomposition methods and the load balancing strategy
we have used to ensure good performance and scalability of huge simulations. We also
describe how we have verified the correctness of the parallel implementation. Additionally we
present performance measurement results for the simulator by running a fixed 32,300 ha
simulation on 1-2048 processors and a simulation with 1,000 ha/core on 1-2048 cores. The
results show that it is possible to simulate a forest area of more than 1,000,000 ha with
several billion trees.

BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{jSiScAsWe10a,
  title = {Parallelization, Spatial Decomposition and Load Balancing of a Single Tree Level Forest Dynamics Simulator},
  author = {Signell, Artur and Schöring, Johan and Aspnäs, Mats and Westerholm, Jan},
  journal = {Mathematical and Computational Forestry and Natural Resource Sciences},
  volume = {2},
  number = {1},
  pages = {30–40},
  year = {2010},
  keywords = {Forest dynamics simulation, individual tree, high-performance computing, parallel programming},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): High Performance Computing and Communication

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