TOWARDS THE ULTIMATE ITERATIVE SUBSTRUCTURING METHOD - COMBINED NUMERICAL AND PARALLEL SCALABILITY, AND MULTIPLE LOAD CASES

First, we overview the FETI substructuring method and discuss its nume rical scalability properties. Next, we present an extension to structu ral analysis with multiple load cases, and to the solution of systems with repeated right hand sides. Such systems arise, among others, in l inear transient analysis and in the solution of eigenvalue problems. W e show that this extension prompts the design of an efficient parallel coarse grid solver which transcends the numerical scalability of the FETI method into a massively parallel scalability. We illustrate these ultimately desirable properties and demonstrate their impact on compu tational performance with the static and transient analyses via the FE TI method of two large-scale three-dimensional structural problems on a 128-processor iPSC-860 system.