Transient Solid Dynamics Simulations on the Sandia/Intel Teraflop Computer

We describe our parallelization of PRONTO, Sandia's transient solid dynamics code, via a novel algorithmic approach that utilizes multiple decompositions for different key segments of the computations, including the material contact calculation. This latter calculation is notoriously difficult to perform well in parallel, because it involves dynamically changing geometry, global searches for elements in contact, and unstructured communications among the compute nodes. Our approach scales to at least 3600 compute nodes on problems involving millions of finite elements. We can simulate models using more than ten million elements in a few tenths of a second per timestep.