Parallel computing method for discontinuous deformation analysis using OpenMP

The discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) strictly meets balance requirements and energy conservation, and has complete kinematics and numerical reliability. However, the computation time of simulating large-scale geotechnical engineering is too long, especially for solving linear equations; the parallel computing will be a good solution to the problem. Firstly, two contents of non-zero storage in DDA have been described. One is the block compressed sparse row method, and the other is the iterative scheme of non-zero position recording based on the trial-error. Furthermore, we have introduced the block Jacobi iterative method to parallel solving linear equations of DDA, and improved the non-zero storage method. Finally, benefit from the sub-matrices storing, parallel computing of the DDA has been achieved based on Opening Multi-Processing. The improved DDA program has been used to simulate the failure process of the underground caverns; the speedup is obtained to evaluate the parallel efficiency. The results demonstrate that the parallel computing strategy can greatly improve the computational efficiency of DDA for the problems with various sizes. The investigations of this paper will promote DDA to the engineering simulation.