Muttil, Nitin, Liong, Shie-yui and Nesterov, Oleksandr (2007) A parallel shuffled complex evolution model calibrating algorithm to reduce computational time. In: MODSIM 2007 International Congress on Modelling and Simulation, 10-13 December 2007, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Abstract

The Shuffled Complex Evolution (SCE-UA) method has been widely applied for calibration of rainfall-runoff models and has been shown to be robust and efficient search algorithm. In spite of its superiority, since many commonly used rainfallrunoff models have large simulation times, the use of model calibrating algorithms may become impractical due to the high computational time involved. This would necessitate the use of superior parallel computing technologies in the calibrating algorithms, with the aim of reducing the computational times. This study aims to parallelize the SCE-UA to accelerate the model calibrating process. In this study, it is observed that the parallelization of SCE-UA leads to ‘linear speedups’ in the model calibrating process. This means that if a calibration run requires 20 hours to complete 1000 model simulations, then using 4 PCs in parallel would take 5 hours to complete the same number of model simulations. Moreover, parallelization of SCE-UA using PCs that are linked by a LAN is an easy and affordable alternative to achieve significant reduction of the computational time, without resorting to expensive high-end systems. Such savings in computational time in turn facilitates significantly more search of the parameter space during the calibration process.

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