An integrated approach to solving mechanical problems on parallel computers

Possibilities of a programming environment that integrates the specificity of the different types of parallel computers are presented in the framework of computational structural mechanics. An extension of the development environment of the Finite Element code CASTEM 2000 has been realized to offer the user a global vision on all objects of the parallel application. To facilitate the implementation of parallel applications, this system hides data transfers between processors and allows a direct reuse of modules of the original sequential code. It is an object-based shared virtual memory system which allows a parallelism by data distribution (for non-structured data) or by control distribution: it is therefore well suited to "mechanic" parallelism. To validate this programming environment, domain decomposition techniques well suited to parallel computation have been used. (C) 2000 Civil-Comp Ltd. and Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.