An incremental elastic-plastic Finite Element solver in a workstation cluster environment Part II. Performance of a first implementation Original Research Article

This work illustrates results obtained by implementing in a parallel computer environment the gl rate formulation of the theory of plasticity and its integration scheme as illustrated in the preceding Part I. The Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient is used as a tool for repeatedly solving linear systems of equations. Although the investigation about the performance of the workstation cluster as a parallel virtual computer is still far from being completed, it is already possible to conclude that, in such an environment, several techniques proposed for reducing the computer time required by the iterative solver are not applicable. One purpose of the work is therefore to give guidelines in terms of expected performances of the Conjugate Gradient method when applied to stiff problems, in which the condition number may shoot up to the billions. Even if the implemented computer code is not based on the most convenient rate formulation in terms of parallelizability, as shown in Part I of this work, the obtained results indicate anyway that, for some categories of structural problems, the development of a parallel, element-by-element computer code is a promising line of work.