Large-scale explicit computational structural mechanics applications in survivability and protective structures

Explicit time integration based finite element and finite difference numerical methods are a natural choice for many military applications related to Survivability and Protective Structures (SPS) research at the US Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (WES), because stress waves and shock waves must be resolved accurately both in space and time. Analyses of large-scale applications using explicit codes with nonlinear constitutive relations are computationally very intensive. Hence, explicit software that takes advantage of multiple processor computers is a solution to efficiently solve practical problems with acceptable run times and memory requirements. This paper discusses early experiences with shared memory and distributed memory multiple processor computers in solving large-scale, nonlinear, practical Army applications using scalable CTH and ParaDyn explicit software. The status of current domain partitioning approaches used for CTH and ParaDyn is briefly discussed. Scalability of the software for solving practical applications is demonstrated, and one of the numerical simulations is compared with the experimental results. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.