ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOMAIN PARTITIONING TECHNIQUES APPLIED TO THE MATERIAL POINT METHOD

Resumo

This paper aims the development of domain partitioning techniques applied to numerical sim-
ulations using the Material Point Method (MPM). The MPM can be used to simulate various engineering

problems, including those involving submarine landslides, installation of torpedo anchors and dynamical
analysis of structures. The parallel solution of MPM involves the use of parallel computing libraries
and domain partitioning techniques. This procedure potentially increases the processing speed of the

problem and, consequently, reduces computational time. In this work, two geometric domain partition-
ing techniques were adopted: 1) division by horizontal or vertical bands; 2) the Recursive Coordinate

Bisection (RCB) method. Both partitioning algorithms were developed using the C/C++ language and
the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. The MPI library allows the exchange of data among the
several processors used in the simulations considering the use of distributed memory systems. In order to

measure the partitioning quality for the obtained results in several simulations, the load balance param-
eter was adopted. The obtained values were compared to the optimal value calculated analytically. The

results show that the RCB implementation drastically reduces the communication regions between the
processors, which represents a computational gain in simulation time. Therefore, the RCB partitioning
technique has a better performance, compared to the technique of division by bands, since the method
optimizes the partitioning, due to its recursive and iterative characteristics.