A TRANSIENT FETI METHODOLOGY FOR LARGE-SCALE PARALLEL IMPLICIT COMPUTATIONS IN STRUCTURAL MECHANICS

We present a domain decomposition method for implicit schemes that requires significantly less storage than factorization algorithms, that is several times faster than other popular direct and iterative methods, that can be easily implemented on both shared and local memory parallel processors, and that is both computationally and communication-wise efficient. The proposed transient domain decomposition method is an extension of the method of Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) developed by Farhat and Roux for the solution of static problems. Serial and parallel performance results on the CRAY Y-MP/8 and the iPSC-860/128 systems are reported and analyzed for realistic structural dynamics problems. These results establish the superiority of the FETI method over both the serial/parallel conjugate gradient algorithm with diagonal scaling and the serial/parallel direct method, and contrast the computational power of the iPSC-860/128 parallel processor with that of the CRAY Y-MP/8 system.