Ship Hull Hydrodynamic Analysis Using Distributed Shared Memory

In this article we present the results obtained from the execution of a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics program on a cluster of personal computers. The communication and data interchange between the nodes uses a Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system called TreadMarks. The parallelized program was run on a 100Mbit/s Ethernet network connecting 4 personal computers. Using data similar to a real execution on a industrial environment, we achieved a maximum speedup of about 1.7 and measured an allmost constant communication time with various number of nodes. Comparing our DSM solution with a similar parallelization approach but using Message passing we observed that with less effort we can accomplish better performance with less communication if using a DSM system.