GeoFEM, a parallel finite element analysis system, is application software
that is being developed for conducting simulations of solid earth. This sys
tem is currently run on a massively parallel computer and can perform linea
r elastic analysis of a simple shape involving up to 100,000,000 degrees of
freedom. In the present study, the memory capacity required and elapsed ti
me were estimated for large-scale structural analyses, and the efficiencies
were examined to investigate the parallel performance. This paper shows th
e possibility of performing super large-scale analyses with GeoFEM and a pa
rallel computer. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.