OBJECT-ORIENTED PARALLEL PROGRAMMING TOOLS FOR STRUCTURAL-ENGINEERINGAPPLICATIONS

The principal objective of this work is to develop portable and extens ible programming tools for the development of object-oriented parallel finite element codes for structural engineering applications. An obje ct-oriented parallel portability interface for message-passing operati ons has been designed and implemented. An existing object-oriented mat rix library is currently being extended to support the management of d istributed matrix data and parallel solution of linear systems of alge braic equations. By taking advantage of C++ object-oriented programmin g, both the class libraries provide clean and consistent user interfac es, which not only help to improve the clarity and expressiveness of t he client parallel codes, but also hide implementation details and com plexity from the user to ease parallel programming tasks. In this pape r, the object-oriented design and implementation of the class librarie s are discussed. The libraries were first developed and tested using a network of Sun SPARC 10 workstations. Application examples were then studied on two commercial parallel computers: the IBM SP1 and the Inte l Paragon XP/S 10, for evaluation of the portability and efficiency of the present class libraries.