THREE-STEP EXPLICIT FINITE ELEMENT COMPUTATION OF SHALLOW WATER FLOWS ON A MASSIVELY PARALLEL COMPUTER

Massively parallel finite element strategies for large-scale computations of shallow water flows and contaminant transport are presented. The finite element discretizations, carried out on unstructured grids, are based on a three-step explicit formulation both for the shallow water equations and for the advection-diffusion equation governing the contaminant transport. Parallel implementations of these unstructured-grid-based formulations are carried out on the Army High Performance Computing Research Center Connection Machine CM-5. It is demonstrated with numerical examples that the strategies presented are applicable to large-scale computations of various shallow water flow problems.