Large-scale parallel computation for earthquake response spectrum analysis
Abstract
Purpose
As a practical engineering method, earthquake response spectra play an important role in seismic hazard assessment and in seismic design of structures. However, the computing scale and the efficiency of commercial software restricted the solution of complex structures. There is a clear need of developing large-scale and highly efficient finite element procedures for response spectrum analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the kernel theories for earthquake response spectra are deduced and the corresponding parallel solution flow via the modal superposition method is presented. Based on the algorithm and the parallel data structure of JAUMIN framework, a parallel finite element (FE) solution module is established. Using the solution procedure on a supercomputer equipped with up to thousands of processors, the correctness and parallel scalability of the algorithm are evaluated via numerical experiments of typical engineering examples.
Findings
The results show that the solution module has the same precision as the commercial FE software ANSYS; the maximum solution scale achieves 154 million degrees of freedom (DOFs) with a favorable parallel computing efficiency, going far beyond the computing ability of the commercial FE software.
Originality/value
The solution scale in this paper is very challenging for the large-scale parallel computing of structural dynamics and will promote the dynamic analysis ability of complex facilities greatly.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no.11472256), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2016YFB0201005), the Defense Industrial Technology Development Program (Grant no. C1520110002), the Presidential Foundation of CAEP and the Dual-hundred Talent Project of CAEP (Grant no. YZ2015011, ZX04003).
Citation
Fan, X., Wang, K. and Xiao, S. (2018), "Large-scale parallel computation for earthquake response spectrum analysis", Engineering Computations, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 800-817. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-08-2016-0294
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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