Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Swarm and Braided Rivers

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Crile Doscher wrote:

> My interest is braided rivers, rivers with either sand or gravel riverbeds, with 
> typically wide floodplains and relatively steep slopes.  Since the bed is made up of 
> movable material, these sands and gravels are moved around by the flowing water, and 
> in the process form multiple channels (hence the name braided).  You can see these 
> processes at work next time you're at the beach and come across water flowing over the 
> sand.  An interesting aspect of these rivers is their scaling properties.  Regardless of 
> whether it's a trickle of water flowing over sand or the Bhramaputra River (a rather large 
> river), the behaviour seems to be the same: the channels tend to follow a power law 
> distribution in both time and space (not unlike turbulence or earthquakes). 
Interesting!  I think you could use Swarm for some version of this, but 
to really measure the scaling, I wonder if you'll end-up need a little 
more horsepower.  Maybe something like 
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freepooma?  It depends how big of 
simulations you want to run vs. how complex the rules are.  

Out of curiousity, aren't packages like Fluent 
(http://www.fluent.com/software/fluent/modeling_capabilities.htm) 
supposed to track and measure quantities like this?

Anyway, my observation is just that to scale these kinds of simulations 
up (assuming that's a need), I think you'll need special purpose 
software.  Software designed to do one thing very well and to do it in 
parallel on multiple computers.