Fe2000: an Object-oriented Framework for Parallel Nonlinear Dynamic Finite Element Analysis

In this work, an object-oriented framework FE2000 for parallel large-scale nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis is presented. The parallel substructure method is employed for parallel finite element analysis. An extension of the general sparse matrix package SPARSPAK, an iterative mesh partitioning approach, and a multi-level substructure method are employed and integrated. Several large-scale finite element models are used to demonstrate the performance of FE2000 on commonly available personal computers. In the numerical experiments, even for finite element models with up to tens or hundreds thousand degrees-of-freedom, each nonlinear iteration of analysis can be completed within several minutes. Namely, a complete nonlinear dynamic analysis with totally hundreds of nonlinear iterations may be accomplished within a reasonable elapsed time, say, an overnight time.