Parallel Optimality Criteria-based Topology Optimization for Minimum Compliance Design

Topology optimization is often used in the conceptual design stage as a preprocessing tool to obtain overall material distribution in the solution domain. The resulting topology is then used as an initial guess for shape optimization. It is always desirable to use fine computational grid to obtain high-resolution layouts that minimize the need for shape optimization and post processing [1], but this approach results in high computation cost and is prohibitive for large structures. To reduce the computation time of such problems, parallel computing in combination with domain decomposition is used. The power law approach has been used as the material distribution method and for locating the optimum solution; an optimality criteria-based optimizer is used [2, 3]. The equilibrium equations are solved using a preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm. These calculations have been done using a master-slave programming paradigm on coarse grain Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) shared memory architecture. In this study, by avoiding assembly of the global stiffness matrix, the memory requirement as well as computation time has been reduced. The results of the current study show that the parallel computing technique is a valuable tool for solving computationally intensive topology optimization problems.