Parallel coupled simulation of casting processes on cluster of PCs

This paper describes the parallelization of a thermo-mechanical software package that is used to simulate the solidification and cooling process in casting. Such problems require a substantial amount of computing power of high-end workstations which are typically not available in small and medium sized enterprises. In order to overcome this bottleneck this paper introduces clusters of PCs as a computing resource. To show the feasibility of the approach a casting code has been parallelized using a direct substructuring method first. Results show that this method is limited to small problems. Therefore, also an iterative method is presented. Results for realistic examples show a good speedup and give proof that clusters of PCs can make tip for the lack of high-end computers in small and medium sized enterprises.