A Parallel Frontal Solver For Large Scale Process Simulation

For the simulation and optimization of large-scale chemical processes, the overall computing time is often dominated by the time needed to solve a large sparse system of linear equations. We present here a new parallel frontal solver which can signiicantly reduce the wallclock time required to solve these linear equation systems using parallel/vector supercomputers. The algorithm exploits both multiprocessing and vector processing by using a multilevel approach in which frontal elimination is used for the partial factorization of each front. Results on several large scale process simulation and optimization problems are presented.