Hazen, B. C., and M. W. Berry. 1997. The Design of the Land-Use Change
and Analysis
System (LUCAS): Part II - Parallel and Distributed Implementation.
Department of Computer Science
Technical Report No. 95-298, August 1995. University
of Tennessee, Knoxville. Now appears as
Hazen, B. C., and M. W. Berry. 1997.
The Simulation of Land-Cover Change Using a Distributed
Computing Environment.
Simulation Practice and Theory 5:6,
pp. 489-514.
For computer simulations of land use change which will require finer
map resolution (say 90 square meters versus 1 square kilometer)
or larger study areas (e.g., the entire 13-state regional assessment),
a parallel version of LUCAS (called pLUCAS)
has been developed using PVM on a network of UNIX-based
workstations. PVM
is a message-passing environment for designing
parallel yet portable software for distributed computation on a
heterogeneous network of computers.
As demonstrated in this work, the PVM version of pLUCAS (on a
shared 10 Mb/sec Ethernet
network of 20 dedicated 70 MHz Sun SPARCstation~5 machines) has been
demonstrated to be as much as 11 times faster than the
serial LUCAS implementation (written in C++) for selected watershed
land management scenarios. A more robust
and efficient (less overhead due to minimal task spawning) implementation
of pLUCAS using MPI
has now been produced. MPI (Message Passing
Interface) is a more generic (and recent) message-passing environment
for distributed computation.