CPU-accelerated explicit three-dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis with cloud computing

Abstract

Prompt feedback based on a numerical simulation, such as discontinuous deformation analysis, plays an important role in digitalized geotechnical engineering. Cloud computing also prevails owing its flexible configuration and computational power. This study proposes an explicit three-dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis method using explicit contact forces that can circumvent the difficulty of not converging the open–close iteration and the inefficiency of classic implicit discontinuous deformation analysis. The serial code is ready to be parallelized by relocating the postjudgment of the contact status and using LDL decomposition to solve fixed-size linear equations. We propose herein the block-wise parallelization concept, which significantly simplifies the work of parallel computation. No modification under the block level is needed. In addition, one can realize parallel computing by adding just three lines of the new code with the help of OpenMP. A simple virtual cloud machine is used to run the program to validate the improved efficiency of the newly developed algorithms. A 3.5 speedup ratio is achieved with four CPU cores and eight processors.