Chemical Engineering @ChemengFiles.Com

The numerical calculation is a fundamental tool of chemical engineering as well as in many other sciences. An example is the simulation software and process optimization. When the number of variables and equations to solve is high, the limiting factor is the processing capacity. Advances in the speed of microprocessors is reaching its practical limit, and how to get more performance then is to use multiple CPU's in parallel (multi-core). Another activity that increasingly requires more processing power are the servers for computer networks in the chemical company.

In a recent seminar of Intel, called "Parallelism Programming Has Gone Mainstream: Are You Ready?" Refers to this trend and its impact on the world of software.

According to the exhibitors, programmers must adapt to the idea of incorporating parallel processing programs. This introduces several challenges, it is an entirely new way of thinking, as opposed to traditional consisting only run a script in order.

Some of the problems to solve:

• A program should be able to adapt efficiently to 2,4,8 or systems with different numbers of processors.

• The coordination of time between different tasks introduces new types of errors. New tools are needed to detect these conditions.
• It may also happen that some processors fail, and therefore should have security measures for the calculation can go forward with this type of event.
• Programs should be easy to maintain, for example parallel functions should not occupy a large amount of code. Rather, these tasks should be implemented in libraries or used functions and optimized for the processors.

To ease the transition from uniprocessor to multiprocessor they propose the use of new tools to detect errors such as timing or check whether a system will run efficiently on multiple processors.

This will facilitate the widespread use of parallel programming as an art hitherto dominated by a few experts and they still find it difficult to write software that maintains its efficiency when changing the hardware.

Despite these challenges, anticipate that the benefits of the new processors will be large and gives rise to numerous innovations in many areas such as molecular simulations, process optimization, solution of differential equations, process control, business databases etc. All of great interest to chemical engineers.