Parallel Computing of a Meshfree Method and Its Application in Geotechnical Engineering

Among meshfree methods to overcome the ineffectiveness in handling extreme material deformation, Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM) has demonstrated its great suitability for structural analysis. This paper presents applications of RKPM in elasto-plastic problems after a review of meshfree methods and an introduction to RKPM. Different from the graph-based partitioning methods such as Metis, which is quite popular for mesh-based analysis, a geometry-based partitioner is developed and used in parallel computing of the meshfree method. The effectiveness and performance with different partitions are then compared and a comparison of the meshfree method with finite element methods is presented. A slope stability problem in geotechnical engineering is analyzed as an illustrative case. The parallel simulations are conducted on an SGI Onyx3900 supercomputer and a Dawning TC4000L PC cluster, with MPI message passing statements used for all communications among processors for various partitions. The comparison between the RKPM and the FEM under identical conditions shows that the RKPM is more suitable for problems, where there exists extremely large strain such as in the case of slope sliding.