GPU-Powered High-Performance Computing for the Analysis of Large-Scale Structures Based on OpenSees

Numerical simulations using various finite element (FE) software packages have been widely adopted to investigate the seismic performance of large-scale important structures, such as super-tall buildings and large-span bridges. Among these FE software packages, Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (OpenSees), as an open-source FE software program, has increasingly become one of the most influential packages. However, the computational efficiency of the solvers for linear systems of equations (SOE) in OpenSees, which use the direct method, cannot satisfy the demand for numerical simulation of large-scale structures. Consequently, two new parallel-iterative solvers for the sparse SOE are proposed and implemented in OpenSees, based on two graphics processing unit (GPU)-based libraries, CuSP and CulaSparse. The time history analysis of a 141.8 m frame-core tube building and a super-tall building (the Shanghai Tower with a height of 632 m) are performed using the proposed solvers. The speed-up ratio of the proposed solvers is up to 9 to 15, with high accuracy in results when compared with the efficiency of the existing central processing unit (CPU)-based SparseSYM solver in OpenSees. This research outcome can provide an effective computing technology for the numerical analysis of the seismic behavior of large-scale structures.