Distributed Control Parallelism in Multidisciplinary Aircraft Design

Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) for large-scale engineering problems poses many challenges (e.g., the design of an efficient concurrent paradigm for global optimization based on disciplinary analyses, expensive computations over vast data sets, etc.) This work focuses on the application of distributed schemes for massively parallel architectures to MDO problems, as a tool for reducing computation time and solving larger problems. The specific problem considered here is configuraton optimization of a high speed civil transport (HSCT), and the efficient parallelization of the embedded paradigm for reasonable design space identification. Two distributed dynamic load balancing techniques (random polling and global round robin with message combining) and two necessary termination detection schemes (global task count and token passing) were implemented and evaluated in terms of effectiveness and scalability to large problem sizes and a thousand processors. The effect of certain parameters on execution time was also inspected. Empirical results demonstrated stable performance and effectiveness for all schemes, and the parametric study showed that the selected algorithmic parameters have a negligible effect on performance.