FullSWOF_Paral: Comparison of two parallelization strategies (MPI and SKELGIS) on a software designed for hydrology applications

TL;DR

This paper compares two parallelization strategies, MPI and SkelGIS, for a hydrology software solving shallow water equations, analyzing their performance, scalability, and implementation differences.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of MPI and Skeleton-based parallelization approaches for hydrological modeling software.

Findings

Both approaches show similar performance and scalability.

Implementation strategies differ significantly in complexity and flexibility.

Advantages of each approach are discussed in detail.

Abstract

In this paper, we perform a comparison of two approaches for the parallelization of an existing, free software, FullSWOF 2D (http://www. univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/ that solves shallow water equations for applications in hydrology) based on a domain decomposition strategy. The first approach is based on the classical MPI library while the second approach uses Parallel Algorithmic Skeletons and more precisely a library named SkelGIS (Skeletons for Geographical Information Systems). The first results presented in this article show that the two approaches are similar in terms of performance and scalability. The two implementation strategies are however very different and we discuss the advantages of each one.