Large scale drop impact analysis of mobile phone using ADVC on Blue Gene/L

Abstract

Existing commercial finite element analysis (FEA) codes do not exhibit the performance necessary for large scale analysis on parallel computer systems. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance characteristics of a commercial parallel structural analysis code, ADVC, on Blue Gene/L (BG/L). The numerical algorithm of ADVC is described, tuned, and optimized on BG/L, and then a large scale drop impact analysis of a mobile phone is performed. The model of the mobile phone is a nearly-full assembly that includes inner structures. The size of the model we have analyzed has 47 million nodal points and 142 million DOFs. This does not seem exceptionally large, but the dynamic impact analysis of a product model, with the contact condition on the entire surface of the outer case under this size, cannot be handled by other CAE systems. Our analysis is an unprecedented attempt in the electronics industry. It took only half a day, 12.1 hours, for the analysis of about 2.4 milliseconds. The floating point operation performance obtained has been 538 GFLOPS on 4096 node of BG/L. © 2006 IEEE.