Parallel computation of radiation view factors between two arbitrarily oriented surfaces

Two implementations for parallel computation of radiation heat transfer view factors are formulated and tested for a model problem. Using a sufficiently large number of processors and a suitable communications paradigm, the solution time for the problem considered here scales linearly with the number of surface elements in the parallel implementation rather than the quadratic scaling obtained using a serial approach. For larger problems, significantly shorter solution times are obtained using the massively parallel Connection Machine 5 than those obtained on a single processor of the Cray C-90, a traditional vector supercomputer. Parallel performance was degraded for implementations using too few processors or data layouts leading to inefficient processor communication.