GPU parallelization of an object-oriented nonlinear dynamic structural analysis platform

This work parallelized a widely used structural analysis platform called OpenSees using graphical processing units (GPU). This paper presents task decomposition diagrams with data flow and the sequential and parallel flowcharts for element matrix/vector calculations. It introduces a Bulk Model to ease the parallelization of the element matrix/vector calculations. An implementation of this model for shell elements is presented. Three versions of the Bulk Model—sequential, OpenMP multi-threaded, and CUDA GPU parallelized—were implemented in this work. Nonlinear dynamic analyses of two building models subjected to a tri-axial earthquake were tested. The results demonstrate speedups higher than four on a 4-core system, while the GPU parallelism achieves speedups higher than 7.6 on a single GPU device in comparison to the original sequential implementation.