PhD Thesis - staffweb - University of Greenwich

PhD Thesis by John Ewer.to provide a comprehensive tool for fire field modelling scenarios. The most important of thesefeatures are toxicity modelling, pyrolysis and solid fuel combustion [COX95], flash-overmodelling [JIA97], discrete transfer model for radiation, fire spread modelling and secondaryignition. These features are by no means trivial and some are at the forefront of current research[JIA99].9.6 Exploitation of parallel processing architecturesIt is interesting to note that the Object Oriented data structures used in the prototype systemcould be used to provide a fairly simple exploitation of parallel processing architectures. Sinceeach cell is a complete and separate entity and the fact that group solvers and dynamic groupmembership have already be demonstrated as workable, it is possible that a parallelimplementation of the code could be formulated with relatively little additional programming.There are several areas that would need to be addressed i.e. the addition of halo cell regionsabout each group and the scheduling of inter-processor data updates. Where this implementationmay really benefit is from the potential for dynamic assessment and handling of load balancingas under-utilised parallel processes could have additional cells passed across to them in orderto make maximal use of all processors. The data structures of the prototype system minimise theamount of book-keeping and simplify the data access so that parallel implementation is likely tobe greatly simplified.Whilst such exploitation of parallel or distributed architectures is not new [LUKSCH98], it isanticipated that the Object Oriented data structures within the prototype system will greatlyfacilitate the parallelisation of the software.9.7 Interactive control expertiseThroughout the current research there has been a lack of high quality expertise about how tomanage the interactive control of CFD codes. This is mostly due to the fact that CFD9-127