Examination of load-balancing methods to improve efficiency of a composite materials manufacturing process simulation under uncertainty using distributed computing

Process simulations play an important role in guiding process understanding and development, without requiring costly manufacturing trials. For process design under uncertainty, a large number of simulations is needed for an accurate convergence of the moments of the output distributions, which renders such stochastic analysis computationally intensive. This paper discusses the application of a basic distributed computing approach to reduce the computation time of a composite materials manufacturing process simulation under uncertainty. Specifically, several load-balancing methods are explored and analyzed to determine the best strategies given heterogeneous tasks and heterogeneous networks, especially when the individual task times cannot be predicted.