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COMPUTER FIRE MODELING USING THE BG&S HIGH PERFORMANCE CLASS 1 BEOWULF COMPUTER CLUSTER WITH XEON PROCESSORS
Modeling fires and explosions is a computer-intensive process requiring many gigabytes of RAM to implement the computational process, and significant hard drive space to store the results. Simple fire models can be run on a desktop system; however, more complex problems may take weeks to run on desktop PCs and work stations. Multiple computers linked together in parallel and arranged as a computer cluster is the proper venue for providing efficient and effective modeling capabilities.
BG&S owns and operates a group of closely linked computer processors (CPUs) arranged in a cluster that are specifically designed and dedicated for advanced mathematical simulation of fire and explosion phenomena using the latest computational fluid dynamics (CFD) computer codes. Our thirty load-balancing CPUs are used solely for running complex simulations, thereby greatly reducing the computational process time and increasing flexibility options for exercising the research objective. Output data are maintained on the cluster in redundant hard drives and then transferred to a stand alone cluster file server to ensure safekeeping and security.
The BG&S computer cluster provides clients with a state-of the-art system that can develop and perform simulations quickly – yielding results in hours instead of weeks. This system facilitates our ability to test multiple fire origin and cause hypotheses under a variety of conditions and in varying levels of detail. Computer modeling affords us a very powerful tool that can substantiate or refute alleged developing fire scenarios involving fire and smoke spread, event timelines and reported witness observations, generate heat flux data and surface temperature history, and calculate, inter alia, the activation times and sequence of fire protection devices.
BG&S allows its clients to access our cluster and provides expert assistance in creating, debugging and monitoring computer fire models. Our certified staff can assist in compiling information on how materials perform in fires, what are appropriate heat release rate input data based on large scale fire tests and how to input that information into the simulation for meaningful results.
| System Specifications |
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| Nodes |
15 each |
one Master |
| Processors |
30 each |
2.4 GHz Xeon dual CPU's |
| RAM |
3GB PC2100 |
per node |
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4GB PC2100 |
Master |
| Storage |
40GB |
per node |
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300GB x2, RAID-1 |
Master |
| Operating System |
ROCK Linux |
clients |
| File server |
1.5TB |
RAID-5 |
Further information on Fire Modeling, Fire Testing, and how they relate to fire investigation may be found at the National Institute’s (NIST) Fire Research homepage: http://www.fire.nist.gov
Examples of the application of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) model and its capability can be found at: http://www.fire.nist.gov/fds/index.html
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