Parallel computation of turbulent combustion and flame spread in fires

A parallel procedure based on a single-program, multiple-data (SPMD) algorithm is presented for parallel computing of turbulent combustion and flame spread in fires. The computation is based on modeling of radiative turbulent reacting flow and pyrolysis of solid fuel. With angular domain decomposition applied to the parallel computing of radiation and spatial domain decomposition to the computation of nonradiative turbulent reacting flow and solid fuel pyrolysis, the whole computation is distributed among a group of concurrent tasks, which communicate with each other through a message-passing interface library. Using this procedure, a self-developed computational combustion code has been parallelized on both a multiprocessor PC and a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system, SGI Origin 2000. The parallelization was verified by comparing the parallel results with sequential results. The performance of the parallel procedure was evaluated using various test cases. As expected, the efficiency of parallelism varies with both computer architecture and case scenario. In general, good efficiency was obtained