Parallelization of a three-dimensional shallow-water estuary model on the KSR-1

Flows in estuarial and coastal regions may be described by the shallow-water equations. The processes of pollution transport, sediment transport, and plume dispersion are driven by the underlying hydrodynamics. Accurate resolution of these processes requires a three-dimensional formulation with turbulence modeling, which is very demanding computationally. A numerical scheme has been developed which is both stable and accurate - we show that this scheme is also well suited to parallel processing, making the solution of massive complex problems a practical computing possibility. We describe the implementation of the numerical scheme on a Kendall Square Research KSR-1 multiprocessor, and present experimental results which demonstrate that a problem requiring 600,000 mesh points and 6,000 time steps can be solved in under 8 hours using 32 processors.