Scalable parallel dynamic fracture simulation using an extrinsic cohesive zone model

In order to achieve realistic cohesive fracture simulation, a parallel computational framework is developed in conjunction with the parallel topology based data structure (ParTopS). Communications with remote partitions are performed by employing proxy nodes, proxy elements and ghost nodes, while synchronizations are identified on the basis of computational patterns (at-node, at-element, nodes-to-element, and elements-to-node). Several approaches to parallelize a serial code are discussed. An approach combining local computations and replicated computations with stable iterators is proposed, which is shown to be the most efficient one among the approaches discussed in this study. Furthermore, computational experiments demonstrate the scalability of the parallel dynamic fracture simulation framework for both 2D and 3D problems. The total execution time of a test problem remains nearly constant when the number of processors increases at the same rate as the number of elements. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.