Parallel Computing in Civil Engineering

Abstract

This issue marks the beginning of a new initiative in parallel computing. I would like to start with the statement by Grace Hopper 1910–1992 , pioneer computer scientist and U.S. Navy admiral, “In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn’t budge a log, they didn’t try to grow a larger ox but used more oxen. We shouldn’t be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers.” The essence of this message is that it is very difficult to build a single processor computer that can handle the processing needs of any application. In other words, no matter how powerful a single processor computer is, there are always applications that require the power of parallel processing. The problems that we face as civil engineers are rapidly changing with increasing emphasis on homeland security, civil infrastructure protection, sustainability, and smart designs. These changing focuses put a premium on large-scale computation and real-time processing for many applications. Enabling parallel computation for these applications is not trivial due to inherent complexities of emerging parallel computing environments, lack of easily usable software libraries for these environments, and the dynamic nature of data and computation needs for some real-time processing applications. Consumer needs and economic reality have changed the face of parallel computing dramatically over the last two decades with the infusion of a new generation of supercomputers with hierarchical memory subsystems, nonuniform processor configurations, and heterogeneous geographically distributed grid computing environments. Obtaining good performance on these environments for real-world applications is extremely challenging even with available middleware tools such as MPI, Globus, Matlab distributed computing toolbox, and parallel numerical software such as PETSc, SCALAPACK, DAKOTA, ParMETIS, and Aztec. Therefore, prospective users such as civil engineers are forced to develop their own algorithms and/or implementations for their application needs. Despite the fact that parallel computing has been an active research area for the last two decades and that the demand for parallel computing is increasing in civil engineering, the leading computing journal in civil engineering, JCCE, has seen very few papers in this area averaging about one article per year . This editorial’s purpose is to change this trend by issuing a call to the civil engineering community to support an initiative in parallel computing. I will next address the type of parallel computing articles we would like to publish in JCCE, i.e., what do we want in a parallel computing article for JCCE? Prospective authors may consider the following questions: