DISTRIBUTED FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS - SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

A concurrent finite element analysis of truss structures is carried ou t in a distributed environment consisting of workstations connected to the Ethernet. The remove procedure call combined with thp ability to create threads of computation is used to efficiently implement distrib uted and concurrent programs. The finite element algorithm is combined with the client-server model to achieve distributed computation, incl uding the distributed solution of finite element equations. Scalabilit y analysis and performance in terms of speedup and efficiency is carri ed out for moderately sized truss structures. Implementation results i ndicate that typical algorithms for finite element analysis are fairly scalable for commonly employed local area network topologies.