high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Lagrangian particle-tracking models are a computationally intensive, but massively parallelizable method for investigating marine larval dispersal processes, seed dispersal of plants, or a variety of other material transport processes. In order to fully capture the distribution of potential dispersal patterns, highly efficient models with the capacity to simulate tens of millions or more particles are needed. Traditionally, this goal has been achieved using models written in Fortran and parallelized using Message Passing Interface (MPI). This project is an investigation of a variety of techniques for parallelizing Lagrangian particle-tracking models, including using MPI, OpenMP, and graphics processing units (GPUs). This report summarizes the implementation of each parallelization strategy, compares the performance of each implementation, and concludes with suggestions for further development that could be done on this model.