Parallelized two-scale analysis with a PC cluster for elastic-plastic heterogeneous media

This paper presents a method of parallel computation particularized for the two-scale analysis of elastic-plastic heterogeneous media with periodic microstructures. Due to the mathematical structure inherent to the multi-scale modeling by the homogenization theory, the numerical algorithm is successfully incorporated with a clustered-type parallel computer. A simple numerical example is presented to illustrate the essential idea of parallelized, nonlinear two-scale analysis method and the algorithmic difficulty associated with computational load for each CPU. To overcome such difficulty, we present the modified parallel algorithm, in which the computational loads of CPU's are almost equalized according to the nonlinear response of each microstructure. A proposed xmethod is applied to simulate the tensile test for a steel specimen.