A distributed simulation environment for water resource site analysis

The United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA, NRCS), Water Resource Site Analysis Software (SITES) is a distributed, event-oriented model used for hydrologic and hydraulic analysis of water control structures (sites). This paper describes the design of an integrated development environment (SITES-IDE) that enhances the capability of SITES. The development environment can be used to analyze the effect of various hydrologic or hydraulic conditions on a given spillway design, and to efficiently compare alternative spillway designs. A graphical user interface is developed to visualize simulation results and evaluate alternative designs. A summary of several runs is displayed in a summary table. From Me summary table, a user can graphically compare differences between runs, or jump directly to detailed text or graphical output for a given run. Within a single run, hydrologic elements are organized within a tree, called a topological model. Elements are processed by performing a postorder traversal of the tree. This allows for fine-grained parallelism within each run. Also, within a project, several runs may be analyzed concurrently, resulting in coarse-grained parallelism.