Running air pollution models on the connection machine

• Authors: Z. Zlatev;J. Waniewski
• Venue: Mathematical and Computer Modelling: An International Journal
• Year: 1994

The concentrations of air pollutants have, in general, been steadily increasing during the last three decades. Therefore, there is an increasing need to control the air pollution: air pollution should be reduced to acceptable levels and/or kept under these levels in order to prevent damage to, and even destructions of ecosystems. However, the reduction of air pollution is an expensive process. This means that air pollution should be reduced as much as needed, but no more. Mathematical models can successfully be used both to study air pollution and to search for optimal ways of reducing it to some acceptable levels. The damaging effects are normally due to the combined effects of several air pollutants. Therefore, a reliable mathematical model must study simultaneously all relevant air pollutants. This requirement increases the size of the air pollution models. The discretization of models that contain many air pollutants leads to huge computational problems. After the discretization of such an air pollution model, systems of several hundred thousands (or even several millions) of equations arise, and these have to be treated numerically during many time-steps (typically several thousands). Such big computational problems can successfully be treated only on big modern vector and/or parallel computers. However, access to a big high-speed computer is not sufficient. One should also ensure that the great potential power of the computer is correctly exploited to obtain really fast computations. Very often this is a rather difficult task. The efforts to solve this task in the case where the computer under consideration is the Connection Machine (CM-200) will be discussed in this paper.