Documentation of computer program GRIDDEL

The GRIDDEL computer program which generates finite element meshes for NASTRAN in a manner convenient to the study of laminated composite flat plates is discussed. The program is capable of creating 8 node HEXA elements, GRID coordinates, and PSOLID data in the appropriate NASTRAN format. It is more convenient for this purpose than use of NASTRAN's preprocessors

Nonlinear Analysis of Thin Fracture Specimens Using Solid, Isoparametric Finite Elements

This report examines the performance of various "solid" finite elements for the analysis of thin shell structures often encountered in nonlinear fracture mechanics studies. Such models require solid elements in the crack front region to capture strong through-thickness effects; modeling of the entire test specimen-structural element with solid elements then proves convenient. Unfortunately, the standard 8-node "brick" element with full integration exhibits strong shear-locking under bending deformations and thus overly stiff behavior. Three alternative elements are examined here: the 8-node element with single-point integration, the 8-node element with enhanced (incompatible) modes and the 20-node (quadratic) element. Element performance is assessed through analyses of a thin M(T) fracture specimen loaded in remote tension. This specimen generates strong compressive (T- )stresses parallel to the crack growth direction which leads to out-of-plane bending in the crack front region (triggered by a small normal force). The displacements obtained with a refined mesh of thin shell elements provide the reference solution for evaluation of the solid element performance. The analyses include large-displacement effects, but linear material response for simplicity, and are performed with Abaqus 5.6 and Warp3D. The results show clearly that both the 8-node element with enhanced modes and the 20-node element with conventional reduced integration provide solutions of accuracy comparable to the thin shell element. Mixed 8 and 20-node element meshes for ductile fracture analyses with transition elements to maintain displacement compatibility are demonstrated to provide an accurate and efficient modeling strategy.NASA-AMES Research CenterNASA-Langley Research CenterContract Nos. NCC 2-5126 and NAG 2-112

Lattice QCD on a Beowulf Cluster

Using commodity component personal computers based on Alpha processor and commodity network devices and a switch, we built an 8-node parallel computer. GNU/Linux is chosen as an operating system and message passing libraries such as PVM, LAM, and MPICH have been tested as a parallel programming environment. We discuss our lattice QCD project for a heavy quark system on this computer.Comment: Lattice99 (algorithms and machines),3 pages, 3 figures, espcrc2.st

Placing three-dimensional isoparametric elements into NASTRAN

Linear (8 node), parabolic (20 node), cubic (32 node) and mixed (some edges linear, some parabolic and some cubic) have been inserted into NASTRAN, level 15.1. First the dummy element feature was used to check out the stiffness matrix generation routines for the linear element in NASTRAN. Then, the necessary modules of NASTRAN were modified to include the new family of elements. The matrix assembly was changed so that the stiffness matrix of each isoparametric element is only generated once as the time to generate these higher order elements tends to be much longer than the other elements in NASTRAN. This paper presents some of the experiences and difficulties of inserting a new element or family of elements into NASTRAN

Modified and Trefftz unsymmetric finite element models

The unsymmetric finite element method employs compatible test functions but incompatible trial functions. The pertinent 8-node quadrilateral and 20-node hexahedron unsymmetric elements possess exceptional immunity to mesh distortion. It was noted later that they are not invariant and the proposed remedy is to formulate the element stiffness matrix in a local frame and then transform the matrix back to the global frame. In this paper, a more efficient approach will be proposed to secure the invariance. To our best knowledge, unsymmetric 4-node quadrilateral and 8-node hexahedron do not exist. They will be devised by using the Trefftz functions as the trial function. Numerical examples show that the two elements also possess exceptional immunity to mesh distortion with respect to other advanced elements of the same nodal configurations.postprin

MG-WFBP: Efficient Data Communication for Distributed Synchronous SGD Algorithms

Distributed synchronous stochastic gradient descent has been widely used to train deep neural networks on computer clusters. With the increase of computational power, network communications have become one limiting factor on system scalability. In this paper, we observe that many deep neural networks have a large number of layers with only a small amount of data to be communicated. Based on the fact that merging some short communication tasks into a single one may reduce the overall communication time, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the training iteration time. We develop an optimal solution named merged-gradient WFBP (MG-WFBP) and implement it in our open-source deep learning platform B-Caffe. Our experimental results on an 8-node GPU cluster with 10GbE interconnect and trace-based simulation results on a 64-node cluster both show that the MG-WFBP algorithm can achieve much better scaling efficiency than existing methods WFBP and SyncEASGD.Comment: 9 pages, INFOCOM 201