title: Developing Subdomain Allocation Algorithms Based on Spatial and Communicational Constraints to Accelerate Dust Storm Simulation.
abstract: Dust storm has serious disastrous impacts on environment, human health, and assets. The developments and applications of dust storm models have contributed significantly to better understand and predict the distribution, intensity and structure of dust storms. However, dust storm simulation is a data and computing intensive process. To improve the computing performance, high performance computing has been widely adopted by dividing the entire study area into multiple subdomains and allocating each subdomain on different computing nodes in a parallel fashion. Inappropriate allocation may introduce imbalanced task loads and unnecessary communications among computing nodes. Therefore, allocation is a key factor that may impact the efficiency of parallel process. An allocation algorithm is expected to consider the computing cost and communication cost for each computing node to minimize total execution time and reduce overall communication cost for the entire simulation. This research introduces three algorithms to optimize the allocation by considering the spatial and communicational constraints: 1) an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based algorithm from combinational optimization perspective; 2) a K-Means and Kernighan-Lin combined heuristic algorithm (K&K) integrating geometric and coordinate-free methods by merging local and global partitioning; 3) an automatic seeded region growing based geometric and local partitioning algorithm (ASRG). The performance and effectiveness of the three algorithms are compared based on different factors. Further, we adopt the K&K algorithm as the demonstrated algorithm for the experiment of dust model simulation with the non-hydrostatic mesoscale model (NMM-dust) and compared the performance with the MPI default sequential allocation. The results demonstrate that K&K method significantly improves the simulation performance with better subdomain allocation. This method can also be adopted for other relevant atmospheric and numerical modeling.
authors.affiliation: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.|Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Zhipeng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Gui
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Manzhu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Chaowei
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Yunfeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Songqing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Jizhe
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.|Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin‑Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
authors.forename: Qunying
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Zhenlong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Mohammed Anowarul
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Hassan
authors.affiliation: Yunnan Provincial Geomatics Center, Kunming, Yunnan, China.
authors.forename: Baoxuan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jin
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D055907:Climatic Processes; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004391:Dust; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical
chemical_list: D004391:Dust