Performance Measurements of a Contact Searching Algorithm for Solving Large Deformation Problems

Solving contact problems including friction effects in a parallel environment is still a challenge. In this kind of problems, a number of deformable objects interact with each other undergoing large deformations. A typical example is a tire on a road. The interacting objects can be totally distinct objects or parts of a given object interacting with itself. Contact searching, that is identifying potential contact points on other objects (or on itself), is an expensive task in terms of computational costs. In this presentation, an algorithm for solving contact problems including searching contact points in a parallel environment will be described and analysed. The algorithm presented is original and has no constraint on how the domain decomposition is done. The complexity of the resulting algorithm is higher but allows the use of automatic domain decomposition. We will study its performances as a function of the number of degrees of freedom and processors.