A Proposal to Improve Performance of the Forest Vegetation Simulator - Fire and Fuels Extension

The Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) and its associated Fire and Fuels Extension (FFE) have been used to provide information required by larger software systems like the Interagency Fuels Treatment - Decision Support System (IFT-DSS). Interacting with FVS in an automated fashion has been difficult, and simulations with very large numbers of stands, such as those necessary for landscape analyses for fire planning, could take a significant amount of time to process. This project was designed to: (A) develop a requirements document considering Service Oriented Architecture and how that may apply to FVS, and how FVS will be used interactively; (B) profile the FVS code to evaluate what takes the most processing time and identify possible areas for program optimization; (C) while optimizing and reducing the size of code, migrate FVS to a modern development framework such as Intel Fortran and the Visual Studio IDE; (D) identify platforms and systems that meet needs of the JFSP and other stakeholders, such as creating dynamic link libraries (DLL); and (E) specify and define the use of new technologies in the next phase of software development, such as OpenMP directives, thus implementing multithreading in the base FVS executables or extensions to take advantage of increased computing power of multicore processors