Development and Performance Evaluation of Parallel Finite Element Analysis Using a Network of Workstations.

Abstract

Since the computing environment with many workstations on networks has recently become available, these workstations can be regarded as a virtual parallel computer to perform finite element analyses. There are some problems such as the limitation of communication capacity for large-scale computing using a cluster of workstations on a network. The parallel performance of finite element algorithms, such as the Gaussian elimination method, the conjugate gradient method and the domain decomposition method, depends strongly on the parallel parameters. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the parallel computing time of the algorithms and optimize the parallel parameters. The parallel computing systems are developed based on these techniques and applied to a large-scale problem with 350000 degrees of freedom using twenty workstations.