EPPOD: A Problem Solving Environment for Parallel Electronic Prototyping of Physical Object Design

Abstract

One of the grand challenges for computer applications is the creation of a system that will provide accurate computer simulations of physical objects coupled with powerful design optimization tools to allow optimum prototyping and the final design of a broad range of physical objects. We refer to such a software environment as electronic prototyping for physical object design (EPPOD). The research challenges in building such systems are in software integration, in utilizing massive parallelism to satisfy their large computational requirements, in incorporating knowledge into the entire electronic prototyping process, in creating intelligent user interfaces for such systems, and in advancing the algorithmic infrastructure needed to support the desired functionality. In this paper we address issues related to the parallel processing of the computationally intensive components of the EPPOD problem solving environment on message passing parallel machines and present its software architecture. The parallel methodology adopted to map the underlying computations to parallel machines is based on the optimal decomposition of continuous and discrete geometric data associated with the physical object. One of the main goals of this methodology is the reuse of existing software parts while implementing various components of the EPPOD system on parallel computational environments. Finally, some performance data of the parallel algorithmic infrastructured developed are listed and discussed.