Simulation of a cellular landslide model with CAMELOT on high performance computers

Landslides are natural disasters which can cause serious damages in terms of lives lost, homes destroyed, economies disrupted. By understanding how and where these natural events occur, we can respond effectively when disasters strike. The simulation of landslide hazards is particularly relevant for the prevention of natural disasters, since it enables to compute risk maps and helps to design protection works. This paper presents a parallel simulator developed by a problem-solving environment, called Cellular Automata environMent for systEms modeLing Open Technology (CAMELOT), that handles debris/mud-flows. It allows interactive simulation and steering of parallel cellular computations. CAMELOT is a simulation environment that uses the cellular automata formalism to model and simulate dynamic complex phenomena on parallel machines. It combines simulation, visualization, control and parallel processing into one tool which allows to interactively explore a simulation, visualize the state of the computation as it progresses and change parameters, resolution or representation on the fly, In the paper, we give an overview of the CAMELOT system and show that the dynamics of debris/mud-flows can be simulated using a cellular automaton landslide model. The quality of the reproduced shape of the landslide demonstrates substantial agreement with the real event. Moreover, an evaluation of the performances of the simulator on a Linux Beowulf cluster is presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.