Performance Evaluation on the ALE Formulation in MPP LS-DYNA

The ALE fluid-structure coupling capability in LS-DYNA has become the main tool to accurately simulate the airbag-inflating process. However, it is very time-consuming: Running serially, it has been observed to take more than ten days on various computer platforms. Hoping to obtain speedup by parallelization, LSTC has been making efforts to implement the ALE formulation with MPP LS-DYNA. In this paper, the scalability of this implementation, with the number of processors up to 64, is investigated on an HP Superdome. While the result indicates the current scalability of MPP LS-DYNA is inadequate and its improvement is needed, a preliminary study predicts the McKinley processor of the Intel Itanium Processor Family will make the goal of simulating a full airbag-inflating process within 24 hours possible.