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.