FINITE ELEMENT ALGORITHMS FOR DYNAMIC SIMULATIONS OF VISCOELASTIC COMPOSITE SHELL STRUCTURES USING CONJUGATED GRADIENT METHOD ON COARSE GRAINED AND MASSIVELY PARALLEL MACHINES

Abstract

Recently much attention has been paid to high-performance computing and the development of parallel computational strategies and numerical algorithms for large-scale problems. In this present study, a finite element procedure for the dynamic analyses of anisotropic viscoelastic composite shell structures by using degenerated 3-D elements has been studied on vector and coarse grained and massively parallel machines. CRAY hardware performance monitors such as Flowtrace and Perftrace tools are used to obtain performance data for subroutine program modules and specified code segments. The performances of conjugated gradient method, the Cray sparse matrix solver and the Feable solver are evaluated. SIMD and MIMD parallel implementation of the finite element algorithm for dynamic simulation of viscoelastic composite structures on the CM-5 is also presented. The performance studies have been conducted in order to evaluate efficiency of the numerical algorithm on this architecture versus vector processing CRAY systems. Parametric studies on the CM-5 as well as the CRAY system and benchmarks for various problem sizes are shown. The second study is to evaluate how effectively the finite element procedures for viscoelastic composite structures can be solved in the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel environment. CM-FORTRAN is used. A conjugate gradient method is employed for the solution of systems. In the third study, we propose to implement the finite element algorithm in a scalable distributed parallel environment using a generic message passing library such as PVM. The code is portable to a range of current and future parallel machines. We also introduced the domain decomposition scheme to reduce the communication time. The parallel scalability of the dynamic viscoelastic finite element algorithm in data parallel and scalable distributed parallel environments is also discussed. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.