Parallelized two-scale analysis with a PC cluster for elastic-plastic heterogeneous media

This paper presents a method of parallel computation particularized for the two-scale analysis of elastic-plastic heterogeneous media with periodic mi crostructures. Due to the mathematical structure inherent to the multi-scal e modeling by the homogenization theory, the numerical algorithm is success fully incorporated with a clustered-type parallel computer. A simple numeri cal example is presented to illustrate the essential idea of parallelized, nonlinear two-scale analysis method and the algorithmic difficulty associat ed with computational load for each CPU. To overcome such difficulty, we pr esent the modified parallel algorithm, in which the computational loads of CPUs are almost equalized according to the nonlinear response of each micro structure. A proposed method is applied to simulate the tensile test for a steel specimen.