Es. Fraga et Kim. Mckinnon, PORTABLE CODE FOR PROCESS SYNTHESIS USING WORKSTATION CLUSTERS AND DISTRIBUTED-MEMORY MULTICOMPUTERS, Computers & chemical engineering, 19(6-7), 1995, pp. 759-773
The automated synthesis of process flowsheets is a computationally int
ensive task. CHiPS is a process synthesis package which takes account
of heat integration and stream states at the synthesis stage. By discr
etizing all allowable flows and heat exchanges, a dynamic programming
and branch and bound approach can be used to find the optimal flowshee
t. In this paper, we describe a parallel implementation of CHIPS that
uses the dynamic programming technique only. Good speedups are obtaine
d relative to the best method on serial machines. The implementation i
s portable across a range of architectures, including clusters of Unix
workstations. We show that the communication and load balancing prope
rties of the program make it suitable for workstation clusters.