Elastic-plastic flow simulation using the Supercomputer Toolkit

This article describes the first application program run on Technion´s Supercomputer Toolkit. The program simulates the behavior of a high speed metal projectile colliding with a rigid wall. The velocity of the projectile is high enough to cause plastic deformations. After briefly describing the Toolkit and the elastic-plastic flow problem this article is concerned with the relation between the Toolkit architecture and the properties of the elastic-plastic simulation. The main conclusions are that the parallelization process is straightforward, and the obtained speedup, for a small number of processors, is about equal to the number of processors. The first item is a result of the elastic-plastic simulation computational structure, which can be viewed as computations done within cells that communicate mainly with their nearest neighbors. This structure is parallelized easily and maps simply and readily to a Toolkit parallel computing network. The computation structure leads to a fair amount of local communication among Toolkit processors, but to only a modest amount of global communication. The Toolkit´s local communication is exceedingly fast and the time for local communication is independent of the network size, which explains the second conclusion and fits the requirement of large elastic-plastic problems