Generating a conformal mesh on complex geometries leads to important model size of structural finite element simulations. The meshing time is directly linked to the geometry complexity and can contribute significantly to the total turnaround time. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are highly parallel programmable processors, delivering real performance gains on computationally complex, large problems. GPUs are used to implement a new finite element method on a Cartesian mesh. A Cartesian mesh is well adapted to the parallelism needed by GPUs and reduces the meshing time to almost zero. The novel method relies on the finite element method and the extended finite element formulation. The extended finite element method was introduced in the fie...