A Parallel Contact Detection Algorithm for Transient Solid Dynamics Simulations Using PRONTO3D

S. W. Attaway, B. A. Hendrickson, S. J. Plimpton, D. R. Gardner, C. T. Vaughan,, K. H. Brown, M. W. Heinstein, Computational Mechanics, 22, 143-159 (1998).

An efficient, scalable, parallel algorithm for treating material surface contacts in solid mechanics finite element programs has been implemented in a modular way for multiple-instruction, multiple-data (MIMD) paralllel computers. The serial contact detection algorithm that was developed previously for the transient dynamics finite element code PRONTO3D has been exteneded for use in parallel computation by utilizing a dynamic (adaptive) load balancing algorithm. This approach is scalable to thousands of computational nodes.

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