ParModelica : Extending the Algorithmic Subset ofModelica with Explicit Parallel LanguageConstructs for Multi-core Simulation

Abstract: In today’s world of high tech manufacturing and computer-aided design simulations of models is at theheart of the whole manufacturing process. Trying to represent and study the variables of real worldmodels using simulation computer programs can turn out to be a very expensive and time consumingtask. On the other hand advancements in modern multi-core CPUs and general purpose GPUs promiseremarkable computational power. Properly utilizing this computational power can provide reduced simulation time. To this end modernmodeling environments provide different optimization and parallelization options to take advantage ofthe available computational power. Some of these parallelization approaches are based onautomatically extracting parallelism with the help of a compiler. Another approach is to provide themodel programmers with the necessary language constructs to express any potential parallelism intheir models. This second approach is taken in this thesis work. The OpenModelica modeling and simulation environment for the Modelica language has beenextended with new language constructs for explicitly stating parallelism in algorithms. This slightlyextended algorithmic subset of Modelica is called ParModelica. The new extensions allow modelswritten in ParModelica to be translated to optimized OpenCL code which can take advantage of thecomputational power of available Multi-core CPUs and general purpose GPUs.