A Low Cost Distributed System for FEM Parallel Structural Analysis.

In this paper, a distributed computational system for finite element structural analysis and some strategies for improving its efficiency are described. The system consists of a set of programs that performs the structural analysis in a distributed computer network environment. This set is composed by a pre-processor, a post-processor, a program responsible for partitioning the model in substructures, and by a structural analysis parallel solver. The domain partitioning is performed interactively by the user through a graphics interface program (PARTDOM). An existing FEM code, based on object oriented programming concepts (FEMOOP), has been adapted to implement the parallel features. Different implementation aspects concerning scalability and performance speed-up are discussed. The computational environment consists of a 100 Mbit Fast-Ethernet network cluster including eight Pentium 200 MHz micro-computers running under LINUX operating system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]