Non-intrusive parallelization of multibody system dynamic simulations

This paper evaluates two non-intrusive parallelization techniques for multibody system dynamics: parallel sparse linear equation solvers and OpenMP. Both techniques can be applied to existing simulation software with minimal changes in the code structure; this is a major advantage over Message Passing Interface, the standard parallelization method in multibody dynamics. Both techniques have been applied to parallelize a starting sequential implementation of a global index-3 augmented Lagrangian formulation combined with the trapezoidal rule as numerical integrator, in order to solve the forward dynamics of a variable-loop four-bar mechanism. Numerical experiments have been performed to measure the efficiency as a function of problem size and matrix filling. Results show that the best parallel solver (Pardiso) performs better than the best sequential solver (CHOLMOD) for multibody problems of large and medium sizes leading to matrix fillings above 10. OpenMP also proved to be advantageous even for problems of small sizes. Both techniques delivered speedups above 70% of the maximum theoretical values for a wide range of multibody problems.

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