Parallel CFD fire modelling on office PCs with dynamic load balancing

Grandison, Angus; Galea, Edwin R.; Patel, Mayur; Ewer, J.

doi:10.1002/fld.1278

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…It has been found in previous work that better speedups are obtained on two single processors connected via a network compared to two processors (cores) on a shared memory machine [38,39]; typically dual cores operate at a computational speedup of 1.7-1.9 compared to a single core. This effect is due to memory bus contention on the shared memory computer with both processes trying to simultaneously access the single memory bus within the computer.…”

Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also there is potentially a large amount of interaction between the agents simulated on different computers which may incur additional code complexity and high communication costs between the computers. Domain decomposition is based on a systematic partitioning of the problem domain (geometry) onto a number of sub-domains (sub-geometries) and is the method generally used in parallelising Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based simulations including fire simulations [37][38][39][40]. Each sub-domain is computed on a separate processor and runs its own copy of the evacuation simulation software.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Increasing the Simulation Performance of Large-Scale Evacuations Using Parallel Computing Techniques Based on Domain Decomposition

et al. 2017

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Abstract. Evacuation simulation has the potential to be used as part of a decision support system during large-scale incidents to provide advice to incident commanders. To be viable in these applications, it is essential that the simulation can run many times faster than real time. Parallel processing is a method of reducing run times for very large computational simulations by distributing the workload amongst a number of processors. This paper presents the development of a parallel version of the rule based evacuation simulation software buildingEXODUS using domain decomposition. Four Case Studies (CS) were tested using a cluster, consisting of 10 Intel Core 2 Duo (dual core) 3.16 GHz CPUs. CS-1 involved an idealised large geometry, with 20 exits, intended to illustrate the peak computational speed up performance of the parallel implementation, the population consisted of 100,000 agents; the peak computational speedup (PCS) was 14.6 and the peak real-time speedup (PRTS) was 4.0. CS-2 was a long area with a single exit area with a population of 100,000 agents; the PCS was 13.2 and the PRTS was 17.2. CS-3 was a 50 storey high rise building with a population of 8000/16,000 agents; the PCS was 2.48/4.49 and the PRTS was 17.9/12.9. CS-4 is a large realistic urban area with 60,000/120,000 agents; the PCS was 5.3/6.89 and the PRTS was 5.31/3.0. This type of computational performance opens evacuation simulation to a range of new innovative application areas such as real-time incident support, dynamic signage in smart buildings and virtual training environments.

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Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Increasing the Simulation Performance of Large-Scale Evacuations Using Parallel Computing Techniques Based on Domain Decomposition

et al. 2017

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“…A research version of the SMARTFIRE V4.0 [6][7][8][9] software is used as the base model to perform the fire simulations in this study. A flame spread model has been developed by Jia et al [6] to investigate the Swissair MD-11 in-flight fire.…”

Section: The Smartfire Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of the size of the computational domain, the fire simulation was carried out using the parallel version of SMARTFIRE [9].…”

Section: The Smartfire Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study we investigate the nightclub fire by coupling the Computational Fire Engineering (CFE) tools, buildingEXODUS [4,5] and SMARTFIRE [6][7][8][9] in an attempt to address the issues identified above. The coupling is such that the fire predictions directly impact the performance of the evacuating population throughout the evacuation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coupled Fire/Evacuation Analysis of the Station Nightclub Fire

Galea¹,

Wang²,

Veeraswamy³

et al. 2008

Fire Saf. Sci.

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In this paper, coupled fire and evacuation simulation tools are used to simulate the Station Nightclub fire. This study differs from the analysis conducted by NIST in three key areas; (1) an enhanced flame spread model and (2) a toxicity generation model are used, (3) the evacuation is coupled to the fire simulation. Predicted early burning locations in the full-scale fire simulation are in line with photographic evidence and the predicted onset of flashover is similar to that produced by NIST. However, it is suggested that both predictions of the flashover time are approximately 15 sec earlier than actually occurred. Three evacuation scenarios are then considered, two of which are coupled with the fire simulation. The coupled fire and evacuation simulation suggests that 180 fatalities result from a building population of 460. With a 15 sec delay in the fire timeline, the evacuation simulation produces 84 fatalities which are in good agreement with actual number of fatalities. An important observation resulting from this work is that traditional fire engineering ASET/RSET calculations which do not couple the fire and evacuation simulations have the potential to be considerably over optimistic in terms of the level of safety achieved by building designs.

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