Parallel Substructuring Algorithms in Structural Analysis, Direct and Iterative Methods

This paper reviews the development that has occurred in order to adopt a large scale structural analysis package, SESAM 1 , to the rapid changes in computer architecture as well as to the algorithmic advances that has been made in the past few years. We describe a parallel implementation of the sophisticated direct solution algorithm, based on processing substructures in parallel, but also allowing a high degree of parallelism in the computation within each substructure. We further discuss the use of iterative solution strategies. The paper concludes that iterative techniques should be further investigated and that the current knowledge about such methods makes them attractive for certain special classes of problems already today. We provide a few numerical examples in support of our conclusions.