Parallel Implementation of a Lagrangian Stochastic Model for Pollution Dispersion

Lagrangian dispersion models have shown to be effective and reliable tools for simulating the airborne pollutant dispersion. However, the main drawback for their use as regulatory models is the computation demanding. Consequently, in this paper a parallel version of a Lagrangian particle model – LAMBDA – is developed using the MPI message passing communication library. Performance tests were executed in a distributed memory parallel machine, a multicomputer based on IA-32 architecture. Portions of the pollutant in the air emitted from its source are simulated as fictitious particles whose trajectories evolve under stochastic forcing. This yields independent evolution equations for each particle of the model that can be computed by a different processor in a parallel implementation. Speed-up results show that the parallel implementation is suitable for the used architecture.