Large scale parallel FEM computations of far/near stress field changes in rocks

The paper describes an application of large scale finite element analysis for the assessment of stress changes in rocks induced by mining. This application allows us to illustrate efficiency of an approach based mainly on problem decomposition and parallel computing. For the main part of the computations, which is the solution of large linear systems, we use two decomposition techniques (displacement and domain decomposition). Another decomposition technique is exploited for local FE analysis of the near stress field on so called composite grids. The described methods are tested on the solution of two benchmark problems, which originate from the modelling of the effects of mining. The parallel computations are performed on a small Linux cluster.