Application Of Parallel Finite Element Analysis And Software Architecture In Civil Engineering

As a numerical method, the Finite Element Method (FEM) is being used mostly widely in engineering analysis. With the computer's being invented, the FEM's application for large engineering problems becomes feasible. And from the 1970s, accompanied by the fast development of the computer science and technology, the FEM has achieved a great development in its theory, methods of study, computer program and its application. Since 1990, along with the parallel computer architecture's maturity and the impotant international researches'having been taken into practice successively, which include"High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC)"and"Acelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI)", parallel computing has gained a rapid development. The Parallel Finite Element Computing, of which the purpose is to solve the increasingly complex engineering problems people faced, combined the Finite Element Method and parallel computing technology perfectly.This paper will mainly discuss the following four parts:Firstly, using the VMware Workstation 6.5.2, we had created 3 virtual Centos 5.2 computers in a Windows-XP-Prefessional computer which is a physical PC system. Then we constructed a Beowulf cluster with the 3 virtual computers. The construction of the Beowulf cluster mainly includes the following things:⑴. NFS service (to allow machines mount a disk partition on a remote machine as if it were on a local hard drive);⑵. SSH service (to offer encryption for remote login or remote file transfer);⑶. NTP service (to provide the function of synchronizing the clocks of computers over a network);⑷. SSH Secure Shell (to allow clients to use secure network services over an insecure network);⑸. Compile, install and test MPI library.Secondly, in the mentioned cluster above, we will install and test the modules of the Adventure which is an open-source of parallel Finite Element software in Linux. The modules which will be discussed are as follows: ADVENTURE_TriPatch, ADVENTURE_TetMesh, ADVENTURE_IO, ADVENTURE_BCtool, ADVENTURE_Metis, ADVENTURE_Solid, and ADVENTURE_Impact. After that the related examples about parallel computing and analysis are discussed.Thirdly, using the software of ADINA, the unreinforced CFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic) experiment is modeled and simulated. The first step is to describe the prototype of the experiment. Then we draw the hypothesis according to the experiment's purpose and model the finite-elemented prototype. In the end, comparing with the Single-core sequential computing, Dual-core parallel computing is employed to analysis the results. And of course, it demonstrates the feasibility of the parallel computing analysis. Fourthly, the architecture of the Parallel Finite Element software is introduced comprehensively. From the aspect of the software engineering, the software development process is introduced firstly. And then the relationship between parallel software and sequential software are also compared with each other; at the same time, the types of parallel programming are described. After that, the programming style is emphasized from the aspect of the project management. As is the last but most important point, the architecture of the Parallel Finite Element software in Civil Engineering is sketched in the end.