Programming crashworthiness simulation for parallel platforms

This paper addresses parallel programming paradigms for nonlinear, explicit finite element simulations primarily employed for crashworthiness and occupant safety simulations in the automotive industry. The reliance of industrial design on computer simulation and state-of-the-art high performance computing architectures will be discussed as a motivation for the need for parallel implementations of such codes. Concrete descriptions of parallelisation strategies using shared-memory micro-tasking, message-passing, and high performance Fortran will be given for the industrial simulation code PAM-CRASH™ (and the related code PAM-SAFE™), together with performance results on a variety of parallel platforms.