FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS ON THE CONNECTION MACHINE

This paper describes the adaptation of a finite element program with explicit time integration to a massively parallel SIMD computer, the CONNECTION machine. The adaptation required the development of a new procedure, called an 'exchange', which consists of an exchange of nodal forces at each time step to replace the standard gather and assembly. In addition, the data was reconfigured so that all nodal variables associated with an element are stored in a processor along with other element data. The architectural and C* programming language features of the CONNECTION machine are also summarized. Various alternate data structures and associated algorithms for nonlinear finite element analysis are discussed and compared. Results are presented which demonstrate that the CONNECTION machine is capable of outperforming the CRAY X-MP/14 by a factor of about 10. © 1990.