Efficient parallel solution of structural eigenvalue problems

An efficient parallelisation of an existing sequential method for obtaining the eigenvalues of a structure by an exact analytical procedure is presented. Results are given which illustrate finding the undamped natural frequencies of a rigidly jointed plane frame, but the method is also applicable to buckling problems and to other types of structure. The parallel method is suited to both distributed and shared-memory parallel machines. It seeks to equate the workload of each processor (node) by initially sharing out the work and by subsequently passing work from working nodes to idle nodes. Experimental runs on an nCUBE2 computer show that reasonably high levels of efficiency are possible