Abstract
Biofilms are accumulations of microorganisms on surfaces in aquatic systems developing in highly irregular morphologies. The smallest length scale in a structural biofilm model is orders of magnitude smaller than the biofilm itself. This allows only simulation of small parts of the system and makes computing resources the restricting factor for problem size. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of a state of the art computational model for the formation of biofilm morphology in a hydrodynamic environment and to establish it as a High Performance Computing application. Data parallelism in model and solution algorithms is discussed, and experiences of a first implementation in High Performance Fortran on a GRAY T3E are reported. The biofilm model is combined from different branches of mathematical modeling: a discrete cellular automaton, continuous kinetic equations and conservation laws for fluid flow and substrate concentrations. Due to the irregularity of biofilm structure it is of major importance to apply numerical methods which are capable of dealing with virtually any geometrical structure, Numerical discussion of the algorithms focuses on the computationally expensive parts in the general solution procedure: a Lattice-Boltzmann-Method for Row field calculation and a combined HOC/CDS finite difference scheme for substrate concentration.