A substructure based parallel dynamic solution of large systems on homogeneous PC clusters

This study focuses on developing a parallel solution framework for the linear dynamic analysis of large structural models on homogeneous PC clusters. The framework consists of two separate stages where the former is preparing data for the parallel solution that involves partitioning. The latter is a fully parallel finite element analysis that utilizes substructure based solution approach with direct solvers to perform implicit integration. The linear dynamic analysis of a large scale model was performed on a homogeneous PC cluster and the number of computers was varied in order to demonstrate the performance and the efficiency of the overall solution framework. The performance of the implemented framework was also compared with the widely acknowledged parallel direct solver, MUMPS.