Coupling Industrial Simulation Codes On Parallel Computers Using A Communications Library

This paper describes the COupling COmmunications LIBrary (COCOLIB) [7], which is being developed in the European Esprit project CISPAR [6]. The purpose of the library is to facilitate the coupling of parallel message-passing versions of industrial simulation codes on parallel computers. COCOLIB is written in C++, and offers C and FORTRAN 77 subroutine interfaces to the simulation codes. MPI [13,9] message passing is the basis for the implementation of COCOLIB. We describe the main tasks of COCOLIB and describe the most important problems that will arise. We illustrate one of these problems, the contact-detection search algorithms, by computational results using the prototype COCOLIB implementation.