Domain partitioning and software modifications towards the parallelisation of the buildingEXODUS evacuation software

Computer egress simulation has potential to be used in large scale incidents to provide live advice toincident commanders. While there are many considerations which must be taken into account whenapplying such models to live incidents, one of the first concerns the computational speed of simulations.No matter how important the insight provided by the simulation, numerical hindsight will not prove usefulto an incident commander. Thus for this type of application to be useful, it is essential that the simulationcan be run many times faster than real time. Parallel processing is a method of reducing run times forvery large computational simulations by distributing the workload amongst a number of CPUs. In thispaper we examine the development of a parallel version of the buildingEXODUS software. The parallelstrategy implemented is based on a systematic partitioning of the problem domain onto an arbitrarynumber of sub-domains. Each sub-domain is computed on a separate processor and runs its own copy ofthe EXODUS code. The software has been designed to work on typical office based networked PCs but