Lava Flow Modeling by the Sciara-Fv3 Parallel Numerical Code

This paper presents the release fv3 of the Complex Cellular Automata model Sciara for simulating lava flows. It is based on a Bingham-like rheology and both flow velocity and the physical time corresponding to a computational step have been made explicit. The model has been preliminary tested with satisfying results by considering the 2006 lava event at Mt Etna (Italy). A HTML5 based Web application with a WebGL 3D interactive visualization system has also been developed as user interface for Sciara-fv3. Eventually, the numerical code has been parallelised by the CUDA GPGPU paradigm, allowing for a considerable reduction of the execution time, despite the numerical code complexity.