Reliable High Performance Computing
Strategies for Chemical Process Modeling

Chao-Yang Gau and Mark A. Stadtherr

Department of Chemical Engineering, 182 Fitzpatrick Hall,
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN 46556

Abstract:

Branch-and-prune (BP) and branch-and-bound (BB) techniques are commonly used for intelligent search in finding all solutions, or the optimal solution, within a space of interest. The corresponding binary tree structure provides a natural parallelism allowing concurrent evaluation of subproblems using parallel computing technology. Of special interest here are techniques derived from interval analysis, in particular an interval-Newton/generalized-bisection procedure. In this context, we discuss issues of load balancing and work scheduling that arise in the implementation of parallel BB and BP, and describe and analyze techniques for this purpose. These techniques are applied to solve problems appearing in chemical process engineering using a distributed parallel computing system. Results show that a consistently high efficiency can be achieved in solving nonlinear equations, providing excellent scalability. The effectiveness of the approach used is also demonstrated in the consistent superlinear speedup observed in performing global optimization.