A parallel procedure for nonlinear analysis of reinforced concrete three-dimensional frames

The paper discusses the parallelisation of complex three-dimensional software for nonlinear analysis of R/C buildings structures. It presents a comparative study for handling the nonlinear response in different parallel architectures. The nonlinear finite element model adopts a fiber decomposition approach for the cross-section of beam elements to capture nonlinear behavior of concrete. The parallelisation strategy is designed regarding three items: the numerical stability of the nonlinear procedure, the parallel sparse equation solver and the application on heterogeneous hardware: dedicated shared memory machines or clusters of networked personal computers.