Research Seminar - April 07, 1999

Abstract

I will present a follow-up to my seminar last year on parallel simulation of plankton ecology, focusing in particular on the parallelisation of a model of natural selection in phytoplankton in the Atlantic ocean. The simulation seeks to describe the immensely complex geographical and temporal variation in overall biological production and to explain these variations in terms of the basic laws of biology, chemistry, physics and air-sea interaction. A 32-processor subset of the Fujitsu AP3000 at Imperial College was used for the experiments and a near-linear speed-up was achieved after careful optimisation of both the reference code and the communication operations in the parallel version. Both theoretical performance models and wall-clock execution times will be presented and compared. Experimental results show natural selection as an emergent property - a consequence of internalisation of individual organisms within the model. Ongoing work on biodiversity and epidemiology will also be discussed.