Portable Code for Process Synthesis Using Workstation
Clusters and Distributed Memory Multicomputers
E.S. Fraga
and
K.I.M.McKinnon
Computers in Chemical Engineering, 19(6/7):759-773
Abstract
The
automated synthesis of process flowsheets is a computationally
intensive task. CHiPS is a process synthesis package which takes
account of heat integration and stream states at the synthesis
stage. By discretizing all allowable flows and heat exchanges, a
dynamic programming and branch and bound approach can be used to find
the optimal flowsheet. In this paper, we describe a parallel
implementation of CHiPS that uses the dynamic programming technique
only. Good speedups are obtained relative to the best method on serial
machines. The implementation is portable across a range of
architectures, including clusters of Unix workstations. We show that
the communication and load balancing properties of the program make it
suitable for workstation clusters.