An efficient version of the RMA-11 model

Abstract

RMA-11 is a numerical model widely used for studing the transport of constituents and
water quality in rivers and estuaries. When applied to large water systems like the R´?o
de la Plata, RMA-11 demands long execution times to compute a simulation. This pa-
per presents the analysis of the computational efficiency for the RMA-11 applied to a
transport model of the R´?o de la Plata, and introduces a proposal for improving the effi-
ciency by using high performance computing techniques. The improved implementation
modifies the linear system resolution methodology implemented in the model. A high
performance computing strategy was applied to the FRONTALL routine of the RMA-11,
by changing their logical structure and using a sparse storage format. The experimental
results obtained when solving representative test cases show a significant improvement
on the performance, achieving significant gains in computational speed: the execution
time of the implemented version decreased up to one third of the time of the original
implementation.