The benefits of concurrent computing in tribology system design

Many optimum designs of tribological components are highly time-constrained before final productions. It is well-known that the process of a complex simulated design can be considerably accelerated by using some form of parallel computing. Also, for many tribological models additional assumptions can be relaxed with stricter design constrains, if the execution can be speeded up. In this study, the concurrent computing for tribological design is proposed, which is to perform parallel computing using the multitasking capability of today's operating system. In the concurrent computing a master program, which manages the process of the optimization, is used to launch a number of standalone slave programs (air bearing models) in a quick succession. And the operating system (MS-Windows) of the computer manages the parallel execution of the slave programs. Other than the standard programming language (Fortran 95) this approach uses none of the general parallel programming paradigms or directives, such as message passing interface, OpenMP, or coding using graphics processing units. In this study, the algorithm for the multiobjective optimization is group inching fortification method and the concurrent computing is executed in the algorithm-level. High parallel computing speedups are obtained in the simulated bearing designs. The approach can also be applied in using commercial general-purpose packages for modelling and self-coded methods for optimum design of tribological components or systems.