Challenges of High Performance Computing in Structural Industrial Finite Element Analysis

• January 28, 2009: 11:00am - 12:00pm
• Location: 380 Soda Hall, UC Berkeley

Joint CITRIS, CSE and Scientific Computing Distinguished Lecture Series

"Challenges of High Performance Computing in Structural Industrial Finite Element Analysis"

Louis Komzsik, Chief Numerical Analyst, Office of Architecture and Technology
Siemens PLM Software

ABSTRACT
The new millennium brought significant new challenges to high performance computing in industrial finite element analysis.  Millions of node points and tens of millions of degrees of freedom are now commonplace. These are mainly results of the recent significant advancements in computer aided design tools and the increased use of analysis early in the design phase.

The industry application focus has been extended from simply verifying structural integrity to product life-cycle simulation. The outcome of this is an increased use of coupled analyses yielding more difficult computational problems.

 

A third challenge is presented by the radical paradigm shift in the computational environment. Most of the modelling activities in the industry are now executed on personal computers and there is a desire to do the analysis on clusters of such platforms as well.

 

The computational solutions to these challenges are also rather complex. The first challenge is addressed partitioned solution of linear systems and eigenvalue problems. The second challenge gave a boost to symmetric reformulation and reduced order techniques. The third challenge resulted in the emergence of distributed memory parallel computational strategies for clusters of processors.

 

The presentation will review the computational challenges and present commercially useful high performance computing solutions.

Biography
Dr. Louis Komzsik is a graduate of the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary and worked in the industry for almost four decades. Since 2003, he has been the chief numerical analyst in the Office of Architecture and Technology at Siemens PLM Software.
His industrial work focuses on computational methods for commercial finite element analysis.

 

He pioneered the introduction of the block Lanczos eigenvalue analysis method and multi-frontal sparse linear system solution into commercial finite element analysis. These since have become de-facto industrial standards and have been adopted by most commercial vendors.  These since have become de-facto industrial standards and have been adopted by most commercial vendors. 

 

Dr. Komzsik is the author of a book on the Lanczos method published by SIAM that has also been translated to Japanese, Korean and Hungarian. His book about Computational Techniques of Finite Element Analysis, is in its second edition, and his Approximation Techniques for Engineers was published in 2006. The closing book of his engineering mathematic trilogy is titled Applied Calculus of Variations for Engineers and appeared in 2008. All three were published by Taylor & Francis and they are used at companies and universities worldwide.