PARALLEL EFFICIENCY OF LAGRANGE MULTIPLIERS BASED DIVIDE AND CONQUER ALGORITHM FOR DYNAMICS OF MULTIBODY SYSTEMS

摘要

Efficient dynamics simulations of complex multibody systems are essential in many areas of computer aided engineering and design. As parallel computing resources has become more available, researchers began to reformulate existing algorithms or to create new parallel formulations. Recent works on dynamics simulation of multibody systems include sequential recursive algorithms as well as low order, exact or iterative parallel algorithms. The first part of the paper presents an optimal order parallel algorithm for dynamics simulation of open loop chain multibody systems. The proposed method adopts a Feath-erstone 's divide and conquer scheme by using Lagrange multipliers approach for constraint imposition and dependent set of coordinates for the system state description. In the second part of the paper we investigate parallel efficiency measures of the proposed formulation. The performance comparisons are made on the basis of theoretical floating-point operations count. The main part of the paper is concetrated on experimental investigation performed on parallel computer using OpenMP threads. Numerical experiments confirm good overall efficiency of the formulation in case of modest parallel computing resources available and demonstrate certain computational advantages over sequential versions.