GRID technology for structural analysis

This paper presents a High Performance Computing-based application for 3D structural analysis of buildings. Since the solution of a large linear system of sparse equations supposes the most time-consuming phase, several public domain parallel numerical libraries, with state-of-the-art capabilities, have been tested. The parallel application developed allows reducing the analysis time and simulating larger structures. Nevertheless, structural engineers rarely have available high cost parallel machines. Thus, a Grid Structural Analysis service, that integrates the parallel application, has been implemented, taking advantage of computers geographically distributed in Internet. This service makes it possible to simulate in a realistic way, and concurrently, a high number of different structural alternatives of large dimension buildings during their design stage, without considering structural simplifications or investing in expensive computers.