Development and comparative study of high-performance direct solvers for computational structural mechanics

전산구조해석을 위한 고성능 직접적 연립방정식 해법의 개발 및 비교 연구

In the structural analysis procedure using finite element technique, the performance of a linear equation solver is critical because the linear equation solving part spends most of the computing time for finite element analysis codes. However, most of researchers are still using inefficient profile-based direct solvers such as the band solver or the skyline solver. In this research, we introduce the multifrontal solution method as an efficient direct solution method for structural analysis, and show the efficiency and performance of the multifrontal solution method by comparing the performance of our own implementation of the multifrontal method with the band solver or the skyline solver. In addition, we also compare the performance of our solver with other implementations of the multifrontal method such as WSMP and MUMPS as well as commercial structural analysis packages such as ABAQUS and NASTRAN. Through the performance test results, the usefulness and efficiency of our domain-wise multifrontal solver for structural analysis is shown.