Aeroacoustics on Non-Dedicated Workstations

The simulation of subsonic aeroacoustic problems such as the flow-generated sound of wind instruments is well suited for parallel computing on a cluster of non-dedicated workstations. Simulations are demonstrated which employ 20 non-dedicated Hewlett-Packard workstations (HP9000/715), and achieve comparable performance on this problem as a 64-node CM-5 dedicated supercomputer with vector units. The success of the present approach depends on the low communication requirements of the problem (small ratio of communication to computation) which arise from the coarse-grain decomposition of the problem and the use of local-interaction methods. Many important problems may be suitable for this type of parallel computing including computer vision, circuit simulation, and other subsonic flow problems. Copyright c Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995 This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory’s artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-92-J-4097and by the National Science Foundation under grant number 9001651-MIP.