关键词: 板料成形, 并行计算, 光滑有限元, 图形处理器

Abstract: A parallel algorithm for sheet metal forming simulation based on the edge-based smoothed triangular shell element (EST) and graphics processing unit (GPU) is designed to meet the challenge of computing efficiency and the meshing difficulties during sheet metal forming simulation. Considering the characteristics of EST element and the explicit solution of sheet forming simulation, the smallest computation units are mapped to the threads and the parallel reduction technique is adopted to calculate the single values to realize the fine-grain parallelism of whole computing processes. Compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is used as a GPU programming environment to program our application. The CPU is used to control the program action and the GPU is used to do the numerical solutions in this application to suit to the characteristics of GPU parallel computing system. The numerical examples show that this parallel computing algorithm based on GPU can dramatically reduce the simulation time of sheet forming that it obtained about 35X speedup compare to the traditional serial algorithm based on CPU with the same computing result.

Key words: Finite element, Graphics processing unit(GPU), Parallel computing, Sheet metal processing