COMPLETED DOUBLE-LAYER BOUNDARY-ELEMENT METHOD IN ELASTICITY AND STOKES-FLOW - DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING THROUGH PVM

This paper reports a message-passing master/slave implementation of an indirect boundary element method under a distributed computing enviro nment through Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). The method involves a de flation of the spectral radius followed by a domain iteration which is most suitable to deal with particulate solids or flowing suspensions. The scalability, and the nice load balancing characteristics of the m ethod afforded by the domain decomposition is illustrated by a number of large scale simulations, including the shear and elongational defor mation of arrays of rigid inclusions in an elastic matrix, and the sed imentation of a sphere through an array of neutrally-buoyant particles . Our experience indicates that PVM provides an effective distributed computing environment for suspension research and its applications.