PARALLEL FRONTAL SOLVER FOR LARGE-SCALE PROCESS SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION

For the simulation and optimization of large-scale chemical processes, the overall computing time is often dominated by the time needed to s olve a large sparse system of linear equations. A new parallel frontal solver that can significantly reduce the wallclock time required to s olve these linear equation systems using parallel/vector supercomputer s is presented. The algorithm exploits both multiprocessing and vector processing by using a multilevel approach in which frontal eliminatio n is used for the partial factorization of each front. Results of seve ral large-scale process simulation and optimization problems are prese nted.