Optimization of steel structures using distributed simulated annealing algorithm on a cluster of personal computers

This paper presents a distributed simulated annealing (SA) algorithm for optimal structural design of steel structures under stress, maximum displacement, and inter-story drift constraints. To effectively harness the distributed computing capabilities of a cluster of PCs, a two-phased SA algorithm consisting of simulated quenching (SQ) and SA is developed and used for development of the distributed algorithm. The distributed algorithm is based on two different levels of parallelism, design variable level for a distributed SQ algorithm and candidate design level for a distributed SA algorithm. The distributed SA algorithm is applied to the discrete minimum weight design of a verifying example and two steel braced frame structures. The results show that the distributed SA algorithm implemented on a network of PCs can reduce the computational requirement significantly, and yield more stable convergence histories.