Dynamic Load Balancing in Crashworthiness Simulation

In the numerical simulation of crashworthiness the use of parallel architectures is becoming more and more important. This stems from the desire of engineers in the motorcar industry to get run times which make a dialogue feasible. Parallel computation seems to be the only way to solve these problems in an acceptable time. The computations inherent in crashworthiness simulation can be divided into a contact and a non-contact part. The contact part leads in contrast to the non-contact part to an imbalance due to the uneven (in space and time) distribution of contact. Good scalability becomes a challenge. In this paper we present a dynamic load balancing strategy for crash simulation. It keeps the contact and the non-contact part of the computation separately balanced over the whole simulation time. Results of the dynamic load balancing algorithm are discussed for a contact search algorithm applied to it.