Between classical and ideal: Enhancing wildland fire prediction using cluster computing

One of the challenges still open to wildland fire simulators is the capacity of working under real-time constrains with the aim of providing fire spread predictions that could be useful in fire mitigation interventions. We propose going one step beyond the classical wildland fire prediction by linking evolutionary optimization strategies to the traditional scheme with the aim of emulating an "ideal" fire propagation model as much as possible. In order to accelerate the fire prediction, this enhanced prediction scheme has been developed in a fashion on a Linux cluster using MPI. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis has been carried out to determine the input parameters that we can fix to their typical values in order to reduce the search-space involved in the optimization process and, therefore, accelerates the whole prediction strategy. © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006.