An efficient parallel implementation of the Everglades Landscape Fire Model using checkpointing

This paper presents a low-communication overhead and high-performance data parallelism implementation of the Everglades Landscape Fire Model (ELFM) in a network of workstations (NOWs). ELFM is parallelized under Message Passing Interface (MPI). Checkpointing and rollback technologies are used to handle the spread of re which is a dynamic and irregular component of the model. A parallel application model with the mixture of a variety of asynchronous and synchronous computation is developed. In this model, the asynchronous computation is dominant and synchronous computation is intermittent. The length of each synchronous computation also varies. Based on the developed model, a synchronous checkpointing mechanism is used in the parallel ELFM code under MPI. A simulation is conducted and results show that the performance of the ELFM under MPI is signi cantly enhanced by the application of checkpointing and rollback.