A MPI/OpenMP Hybrid Parallel Nonlinear Equation Solver Used in Finite Element Analysis

Finite element method, as one of calculation methods, has been widely applied in numerical solution of differential equations, engineering structural analysis, and electromagnetic analysis, etc. When solving large-scale, dynamic loading of engineering structures, it is computationally challenging to find the large-scale nonlinear equations. A parallel implementation of nonlinear equation solver, using a combination of MPI and OpenMP, has been developed in OpenSees which is an open source finite element analysis software. It shows good performance to apply this new solver to analyze the scale of tens of thousands of equations order. Furthermore, the HPCToolkit parallel program performance analysis tool is used to analyze the experimental results, Statistics show that the hybrid parallel programming model is more efficient than the one using pure MPI in the multi-core cluster architecture computing environment.