A Comparative Study on Different Parallel Solvers for Nonlinear Analysis of Complex Structures

Abstract EN

The parallelization of 2D/3D software SAPTIS is discussed for nonlinear analysis of complex structures.

A comparative study is made on different parallel solvers.

The numerical models are presented, including hydration models, water cooling models, modulus models, creep model, and autogenous deformation models.

A finite element simulation is made for the whole process of excavation and pouring of dams using these models.

The numerical results show a good agreement with the measured ones.

To achieve a better computing efficiency, four parallel solvers utilizing parallelization techniques are employed: (1) a parallel preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) solver based on OpenMP, (2) a parallel preconditioned Krylov subspace solver based on MPI, (3) a parallel sparse equation solver based on OpenMP, and (4) a parallel GPU equation solver.

The parallel solvers run either in a shared memory environment OpenMP or in a distributed memory environment MPI.

A comparative study on these parallel solvers is made, and the results show that the parallelization makes SAPTIS more efficient, powerful, and adaptable.