Parallel Optimization Scheme for Industrial Steam Cracking Process

The solution of realistic simulation and optimization problems is computationally very intense. Along with the development of parallel computing environment, it is necessary to construct an effective parallel strategy in order to exploit supercomputing power. A parallel solution strategy was developed for the optimization of the whole periodic operation of the cracking coils. The most time-consuming computation step for the gradients is deserialized, an approximate linear speed-up is acquired and the optimization calculation is well accelerated. The optimization work was carried out successfully on a cluster of workstations and the properties of the coarse-grained parallel computation technique were analyzed. The results suggest that the execution time of the steam cracking process optimization can be reduced significantly by distributing the heavy simulation duties onto several computing nodes, which communicate via communication networks.