A-scalability and an integrated computational technology and framework for non-linear structural dynamics. Part 2: Implementation aspects and parallel performance results

An integrated framework and computational technology is described that addresses the issues to foster absolute scalability (A-scalability) of the entire transient duration of the simulations of implicit non-linear structural dynamics of large scale practical applications on a large number of parallel processors. Whereas the theoretical developments and parallel formulations were presented in Part 1, the implementation, validation and parallel performance assessments and results are presented here in Part 2 of the paper. Relatively simple numerical examples involving large deformation and elastic and elastoplastic non-linear dynamic behaviour are first presented via the proposed framework for demonstrating the comparative accuracy of methods in comparison to available experimental results and/or results available in the literature. For practical geometrically complex meshes, the A-scalability of non-linear implicit dynamic computations is then illustrated by employing scalable optimal dissipative zero-order displacement and velocity overshoot behaviour time operators which are a subset of the generalized framework in conjunction with numerically scalable spatial domain decomposition methods and scalable graph partitioning techniques. The constant run times of the entire simulation of 'fixed-memory-use-per-processor' scaling of complex finite element mesh geometries is demonstrated for large scale problems and large processor counts on at least 1024 processors.