High Scalability of Parallel PAM-CRASH with a New Contact Search Algorithm

The numerical simulation of crashworthiness plays an important role in the vehicle design-cycle. PAM-CRASH, from ESI, has been successfully exploited for industrial simulation on massively parallel systems. The most time critical part of the parallel simulation is the contact handling. ESI and GMD have developed a new contact search algorithm (CSA) [1]. The implementation of this algorithm into PAM-CRASH leads to a better scalability. Results of measurements on a 128-processor SGI machine demonstrate the good performance of PAM-CRASH with CSA.