A PARALLEL COMPUTING SOLUTION OF HEAT AND MOISTURE TRANSFER IN UNSATURATED SOIL

New parallel software for the analysis of coupled heat and moisture transfer in unsaturated soil is developed. The model, written in a two-dimensional polar co-ordinate formulation, is based on a finite difference self-implicit method. The code is programmed in FORTRAN with message passing libraries PARMACS and executed on a ʹParamidʹ parallel supercomputer. The validity of the parallel code by comparison of simulation results with experimentally measured values obtained from a laboratory heating experiment is examined. An assessment of the algorithmʹs performance on a large network of processors is also explored. It was found that the simulation results compared very well with the experimental measurements. The efficiency of the parallel code was also revealed leading to the conclusion that the algorithm was highly efficient in nature. The new parallel code was also found to be more efficient when dealing with larger problems requiring more finite difference nodal points, on a larger network of processors