A parallel fish landscape model for ecosystem modeling

Parallelization of a landscape fish population model (ALFISH) is an important effort towards high performance Across Tropic Level System Simulation (ATLSS) on a computing grid. ALFISH models the impacts of different water management strategies in the South Florida region on the freshwater fish population, providing estimates of the food resource available to wading birds. The parallel ALFISH model delivers similar results to those from a sequential implementation. Compared with the average simulation time of the sequential model, which is about 35 hours, the speed improvement of the parallel model on a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) is substantial. Using 14 processors, the runtime of the parallel model with static partitioning is less than 4 hours, and that of the parallel model with dynamic load balancing is less than 3 hours.