Strategies for equilibrium‐stage separation calculations on parallel computers
Alfred John O'Neill, Daniel Kaiser, Mark A. Stadtherr · AIChE Journal · 1994
Abstract When multicomponent, multistage separation problems are solved on parallel computers by successive linearization methods, the solution of a large sparse linear equation system becomes a computational bottleneck, since other parts of the calculation are more easily parallelized. When the standard problem formulation is used, this system has a block‐tridiagonal form. It is shown how this structure can be used in parallelizing the sparse matrix computation. By reformulating the problem so that it has a bordered‐block‐bidiagonal superstructure, it can be made even more amenable to parallezation. These strategies permit the use of a two‐level hierarchy of parallelism that provides substantial improvements in computational performance on parallel machines.