Earticle

Structural analysis of large-scale structures involving large amount of computational load and data storage requires high-performance computing resources. We have previously developed PC-level distributed structural analysis algorithms based on substructuring technique where each personal computer assigned to a slave node has been involved in the computations for single substructures. Recently, it has been proved by the authors that the performance of distributed structural analysis algorithm can be further enhanced by changing substructuring schemes. Therefore a new distributed structural analysis algorithm with one PC to multiple substructures scheme is presented in this paper. The algorithm is implemented on the network of multiple personal computers and applied to structural analysis of two dimensional frame structures.

The computational model and a new eigenvalue solution algorithm for large-scale structures is presented in the form of parallel computation. The computational loads and data storages required during the solution process are drastically reduced by evenly distributing computational loads to each processor. As the parallel computational model, multiple personal computers are connected by 10Mbits per second Ethernet card. In this study substructuring techniques and static condensation method are adopted for modeling a large-scale structure. To reduce the size of an eigenvalue problem the interface degrees of freedom and one lateral degree of freedom are selected as the master degrees of freedom in each substructure. The performance of the proposed parallel algorithm is demonstrated by applying the algorithm to dynamic analysis of two-dimensional structures.

Efficiency of design process for large scale structures highly depends on the development of efficient structural analysis and structural response control algorithms because a successful design involves a number of structural analysis based on iterative structural response control process. In this paper, distributed structural analysis model on multiple personal computers connected by ethernet network is presented. To reduce communication cost required in the process of analysis, substructuring techniques are adopted to evenly distribute computational loads on each processor. With its applications on structural analysis of plane frame structures, performance of the proposed computational model are presented in detail.