Citation

Galea ER, Ierotheou CS. Fire Safety J. 1992; 19(4): 251-266.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1992, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Practical fire-field modelling demands considerable computer resources. This insatiable demand for computer power limited the practice of field modelling to those organisations which had access to expensive computers and applications which could justify the expense. Parallel computing techniques offer the potential of achieving the power required at a fraction of the cost of conventional computer systems. In this paper the development of a fire-field model which has been designed to utilise an arbitrary number of processors operating in parallel cs described. In the implementation discussed here, the processing elements are transputers and the host computer is a 386 based personal computer. However, the adopted approach is not restricted to this particular parallel computing hardware configuration. The capabilities and potentials of the parallel system are demonstrated by performing fire simulations consisting of up to 24 000 computational cells on parallel systems with up to 15 processors. The run time for this simulation has been reduced from over 4 days on a single processor to just over 8 h on the 15 process or system. An interactive graphics system has also been developed which runs in parallel to the main computations.