Towards Scalable Parallel Simulation of the Structural Mechanics of Piezoelectric-Controlled Beams

In this thesis we present a parallel implementation of an engineering code which simulates the deformations caused when forces are applied to a piezoelectric-controlled smart structure. The parallel simulation, whose domain decomposition relies on the finite element representation of the structure, is created with an emphasis on scalability of both memory requirements and run time. We take into consideration sequential performance enhancements, the structure of a banded symmetric positive definite linear system, and the overhead required to completely distribute the problem across the processors. The resulting code is scalable, with the exception of a banded Cholesky factorization, which does not fully utilize the parallel environment.