Portable code for process synthesis using workstation clusters and distributed-memory multicomputers

The automated synthesis of process flowsheets is a computationally intensive task. CHIPS is a process synthesis package which takes account of heat integration and stream states at the synthesis stage. By discretizing all allowable flows and heat exchanges, a dynamic programming and branch and bound approach can be used to find the optimal flowsheet. In this paper, the authors describe a parallel implementation of CHIPS that uses the dynamic programming technique only. Good speedups are obtained relative to the best method on serial machines. The implementation is portable across a range of architectures, including clusters of Unix workstations. The authors show that the communication and load balancing properties of the program make it suitable for workstation clusters.