Improving Parallel Substructuring Efficiency by Using a Multilevel Approach

Abstract

This research adopted a multilevel substructuring approach to improve the efficiency of parallel substructure finite-element analysis. The multilevel approach employed in this work provides a simple way to parallelize the computational workload of solving the interface equation system and reduces the total time cost. Eight numerical examples of structural analysis were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the multilevel parallel substructural method for nonlinear dynamic structural analysis. The scalability with respect to number of cores and problem sizes was investigated. The results showed that, compared with the ordinary single-level approach, the multilevel approach reduces up to 50% of the interface equation system solving time and improves the overall efficiency of parallel substructural method by up to 40% in the examples.