Adaptive finite element analysis on a parallel and distributed environment

Industries in general and automotive industries in particular, use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for better solutions to the engineering problems they encounter. The reliability of the Finite Element method can be improved to a larger extent by Adaptive Finite Element Analysis (AFEA), As we look towards increasingly accurate solutions, the process becomes computationally intensive and requires parallel and economic high-performance scientific computing environments to solve them. In this paper we present a parallel implementation of AFEA on a cluster of workstations and illustrate its efficiency and scalability with examples. In this process, we have developed a user-friendly environment for Parallel Distributed computing which is portable on top of both Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI) message passing layers. We have addressed the issues of the several stages in AFEA from a parallel computing perspective that includes Domain decomposition, Parallel Mesh generation, Parallel Finite Element Analysis using a Substructuring technique and Load balancing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.