Parallel transient dynamic non-linear analysis of reinforced concrete plates

This article describes how parallel processing may improve the computational efficiency of the transient dynamic non-linear analysis of reinforced concrete plates subjected to blast or seismic loading. A parallel scheme for the time marching procedure is presented using the explicit Newmark's algorithm. The finite element formulation with the material modelling (of a strain-rate sensitive hardening-softening, elasto-viscoplastic model accounting for cracking and crushing) is described. The complexity of the material laws and their modelling, induced by the extreme loading conditions, requires vast computational effort per time step. It will be shown that very high computational efficiency may be obtained by decomposing the finite element mesh into a number of sub-domains for distributed analysis on multiple processors. This high efficiency is achieved using distributed memory MIMD architectures (including transputer networks), where the routing of the messages represents significant overhead in terms of inter-processor communication because of limitations resulting from the processor network topology. Through examples it will be demonstrated how this efficiency depends on the problem size (i.e. the level of refinement of the problem idealisation), the number of sub-domains and the status of the analysis with regards to the states of the material. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd and Civil-Comp Ltd. All rights reserved.