Optimum structural design with parallel finite element analysis

Abstract Structural analysis is an important part of the optimum structural design process. Therefore, extra effort should be devoted to make this part as efficient as possible. Since finite element analysis is the most powerful and widely used tool in the structural analysis field, in this paper a new method for structural optimization by parallel finite element method is presented. This method divides the original structure into several substructures and assigns each substructure to one processor. Each processor handles its finite element calculation independently with limited communication between processors. Some numerical examples on the Cray X-MP multiprocessor system with their obtained speedups are presented.