PARALLEL COMPUTING OF UNSATURATED SOILS USING ELEMENT-BY-ELEMENT AND DOMAIN DEOMPOSITON METHODS

摘要

The finite element (FE) simulation of large scale boundary value problems in unsaturated soils is particularly time-consuming owing to the complex properties of the unsaturated porous media. To speed up analyses, a parallel FE code has been developed in this work by using C++ and MPI running on a Linux parallel computer cluster. The "Divide and Conquer" strategy has been used to partition the task among the processors with minimum data exchanges and load balancing. The linear system of equations was solved using the iterative solver BiCGSTAB incorporated within an element-by-element method. One serial and one parallel calculation are presented to validate the code and to test the parallel performance the algorithm.