Industrial applications of parallel computing and virtual reality technologies in the context of nonlinear explicit transient finite element analysis

An ubiquity of high-performance computer architectures, visualization, virtual reality and advanced telecommunications is currently underway, promising to radically alter the way designers, manufacturers, engineers and scientists will do their work. These technologies permit the construction of environments where computer models can be studied in a manner analogous to experimental prototypes. This paper win summarize our application of these new technologies to finite element models, reflecting challenges currently faced by the manufacturing industry. Our current implementation of parallel finite element analysis is. built upon a foundation consisting of geometric domain decomposition, a portable message-passing library (MPI) and the SPMD (single-program multiple-data) programming paradigm. The use of the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) for the interactive virtual reality visualization of finite element results will also be described. Finally, our use of the CAVE as a collaborative tool through the use of the CAVE-to-CAVE software library will be summarized.