Search for: All records

Lyme disease is one of the most prominent tick-borne diseases in the United States, and prevalence of the disease has been steadily increasing over the past several decades due to a number of factors, including climate change. Methods for control of the disease have been considered, one of which is prescribed burning. In this paper, the effects of prescribed burns on the abundance of ticks present in a spatial domain are assessed. A spatial stage-structured tick-host model with an impulsive differential equation system is developed to simulate the effect that controlled burning has on tick populations. Subsequently, a global sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the effect of various model parameters on the prevalence of infectious nymphs. Results indicate that while ticks can recover relatively quickly following a burn, yearly, high-intensity prescribed burns can reduce the prevalence of ticks in and around the area that is burned. The use of prescribed burns in preventing the establishment of ticks into new areas is also explored, and it is observed that frequent burning can slow establishment considerably. 

There are numerous large-scale applications requiring mesh adaptivity, e.g., computational fluid dynamics and weather prediction. Parallel processing is needed for simulations involving large-scale adaptive meshes. In this paper, we propose a parallel variational mesh quality improvement algorithm for use with distributed memory machines. Our method parallelizes the serial variational mesh quality improvement method by Huang and Kamenski. Their approach is based on the use of the Moving Mesh PDE method to adapt the mesh based on the minimization of an energy functional for mesh equidistribution and alignment. This leads to a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to be solved which determine where to move the interior mesh nodes. An efficient solution is obtained by solving the ODEs on subregions of the mesh with overlapped communication and computation. Strong and weak scaling experiments on up to 128 cores for meshes with up to 160M elements demonstrate excellent results.