Cellular Ecolab Russell K. Standish
Abstract
	In the original specification of the Ecolab ККmodel, spatial variation of the system's variables was included, with an additional migration Кoperator introduced proportional to the divergence of the species density. Suitably discretized, the model then consists of a number of cells , each running the non-spatial Ecolab model, linked together by the migration operator. This paper reports on the implementation of such a cellular Ecolab. Originally, it was hoped that computational parallelism might be exploited by providing parallel versions of the underlying array operations used. However, it was found that the cost of the irregular data communication involved in the sparse matrix Кmultiplication destroyed any gain from parallelism. Thus a Cellular Ecolab offers a way of exploiting parallelism, Кand for certain situations a superlinear speedup Кis observed. As an example of the type of problem addressable by a spatial Ecolab, the species-area rule Кis examined, although the results are not good enough at this stage to be definitive.

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