Performance of shallow water equations model on the computational grid with overlay memory architectures

In this paper, we study the impact of memory architectures, distributed memory (DM) and virtual shared memory (VSM), in the solution of parallel numerical algorithms on a multi-processor nodes cluster. The parallel implementation of the shallow water equations to model the Tsunami effect is chosen to be the case study. Data is partitioned into sub domains, namely a three into four Grid scheme and a six into eight Grid scheme which are used for the parallel implementation of this model. We present four parallel algorithms in each Grid scheme: distributed memory without threads, distributed memory with threads, virtual shared memory without threads, and virtual shared memory with threads. These eight parallel algorithms have been implemented on a high performance cluster, connected to the ldquoNordugridrdquo. Experiments are realized using the message passing interface (MPI) library, the C/Linda, and the Linux pthreads. Subject to available memory, the virtual shared memory version without threads performs best, but as the task is scaled up, the threaded version becomes efficient in both DM and VSM implementations.