Applying domain decomposition to wind field calculation

Abstract

Predicting forest fire propagation is a crucial issue to mitigate fire damages.Wind significantly affects forest fire propagation.Wind field calculation implies solving extremely large systems of equations.The Schur method has been applied to accelerate wind field calculation.Execution time is reduced to accomplish operational requirements. Forest fire are natural hazards that every year cause significant looses. Predicting the evolution of a forest fire is a critical issue in mitigating its effects. Such predictions must accomplish strict real time constraints to be effective. Wind field calculation is a key issue in providing accurate forest fire propagation predictions. However, it implies solving large linear systems with 105 to 108 variables that takes too long using conventional methods. Therefore, the domain decomposition Schur method has been applied to accelerate wind field calculation. Using the Schur method, the linear system is significantly reduced and several phases can be parallelised exploiting cluster computing capabilities. Results show that the execution time for the wind field calculation of a map of 800 × 800 cells has been reduced from 400 s to 90 s using 10 nodes.