On Scalability of Distributed Simulation and Optimization of Forming Processes

Advances in the processing power of modern computer hardware and the availability of sophisticated simulation software have fostered the use of virtual prototyping techniques in the automotive industry. However, many engineering problems require simulation and optimization computations so complex that it is imperative to utilize parallel computing to solve these problems in reasonable time. In this paper, FETI‐INDEED — a parallelized simulation code for sheet metal forming — as well as algorithms for distributed optimizations are examined. Because it is anticipated that increasingly large problems will need to be solved in the future, particular focus is put on scalability aspects of these components. Experimental results are provided for optimizations which were performed on a 300 CPU Opteron cluster.