Coupling fluids and structures codes on MPI

In the last few years lots of industrial simulation applications were ported onto parallel systems to gain more computational power. Besides other parallelisation techniques message-passing seems to be the most powerful and accepted one. Since MPI is the upcoming standard definition for message-passing libraries, portability and adaptation among different hardware- and software-environments becomes more and more realistic. However some problems are still unsolved, if two or more independent parallel MPI-applications are coupled and work together. This article shows some of the problems which might arise in coupling independent parallel codes: e.g. management of separate address spaces, definition of dedicated neighborhoods, integration of dynamic process sets and synchronisation events