Distributed finite-element analysis on network of workstations - implementation and applications

The implementation of distributed algorithms for the finite-element analysis of structures developed in a 1995 paper by Adeli and Kumar is presented here. A common class of object-oriented data structures has been developed for generation and display of data distribution among the workstations and interprocess communication scheme. The algorithms presented are robust and versatile and have been applied to analysis of large structures with complicated and unstructured topology. In spite of the high latency and low bandwidth of the ethernet networks, an overall parallelization efficiency in the range of 75-90% is obtained on a cluster of six IBM RS/6000 workstations for large structural models with a few thousand elements. Research suggests that with the emergence of high-speed communication networks, workstation clusters are likely to emerge as an effective alternative to high-performance computing in structural engineering due to their cost/performance advantage over the current generation of supercomputers.