Parallelization of an object-oriented FEM dynamics code:: influence of the strategies on the Speedup

This paper presents an implementation in C + + of an explicit parallel finite element code dedicated to the simulation of impacts. We first present a brief overview of the kinematics and the explicit integration scheme with details concerning some particular points. Then we present the OpenMP parallelization toolkit used in order to parallelize our FEM code, and we focus on how the parallelization of the DynELA FEM code has been conducted for a shared memory system using OpenMP. Some examples are then presented to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed implementations concerning the Speedup of the code. Finally, an impact simulation application is presented and results are compared with the ones obtained by the commercial Abaqus explicit FEM code. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.