Simulation of automobile crashworthiness using clustered parallel computers

Automobile crashworthiness involving large scale contactimpact computations were simulated using a parallel algorithm implemented in a cluster environment. The finite element formulas for the contactimpact analysis were implemented in parallel algorithms to calculate the internal forces and the contact process, where local contact and arbitrary contact have different parallel implementations. A flowchart is given describing the parallel implementation in the cluster environment. The numerical results agree well with clush results for a Ford car. The speedup was approximately 5.5 in a cluster with 8 nodes.