Advanced Computational Methods in Structural Engineering

The increase in the clock speeds of single processors almost stopped due to the space limitations, power, and cooling requirements for processors. These physical limitations forced the processor manufacturers to change their direction to produce processors having more than one processing unit. Therefore, to balance the expectations of the structural engineers, new solution strategies that can utilize the available multi-processor computers more efficiently are necessary. Parallel Computing techniques are one of the remedy to this problem. In this book, parallel computing techniques applied to the solution of system of linear equations are discussed in detail. Data storage schemes, most popular tools and theoretical background for the methods are presented. In addition to that a novel approach that utilizes dynamic data compression to handle the interactions among the processors is proposed.