Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a General Purpose Finite Element Software Package for Parallel Computers.

摘要

The finite element (FE) method is a widely used numerical method for solving complex engineering problems. The solution of these problems, however, may require days of computer time, especially if the problems are non-linear. An attractive way to speed up these computations is to use parallel computers. Consequently, much effort has already been put into the development of FE programs for parallel computers. However, most of these programs are aimed at solving specific problems, and are based on specific solution procedures. The objective of this research is to develop a good design for a FE software package that can be used to solve a range of linear and non-linear engineering problems efficiently on different types of parallel computers. For this purpose, we have developed an experimental FE package, named ScaFiEP. This package is an object oriented software library which provides a flexible framework for building specific FE applications for parallel computers. It is based on the domain decomposition approach, in which the FE mesh is partitioned into a number of sub-meshes, or blocks. Multiple blocks may be assigned to one processor to facilitate dynamic load balancing. Although ScaFiEP has been designed with this purpose in mind, the load balancing algorithm itself has not yet been implemented.