Seminar - March 04, 1998

Abstract

In order to understand the dynamics of various species populations in the world's oceans a "Virtual Ecology Workbench" (VEW) has been developed at Imperial College. This potentially can model a wide range of species although the focus of interest is in the various marine plankter which form the basis of the food chain. Using VEW biologists can contruct simulation models of arbitrary complexity by wiring together science modules via a graphical user interface. In order to explore large-scale problems and to model accurately effects such as genetic evolution we have been studying various parallelisation strategies with a view to running VEW models on high-performance message-passing computers such as the Fujitsu AP3000 at Imperial College. In this introductory talk I will describe some of the underlying marine biology which VEW attempts to recreate and will outline the computational structure of a one-dimensional water column model which the VEW uses as a basis. I will conclude with a discussion of the various parallelisation options and will present some preliminary performance results.

Tony Field