The design of a tension structure is a complex procedure consisting of many parts which results in an iterative process. This process may include: conceptual design; physical modelling; computer modelling; formfinding; analysis; and cutting pattern generation. To ensure the flexibility required by the designer throughout this process and to shorten the formfinding-analysis-cutting pattern generation subtasks efficient parallel dynamic relaxation can be used. But in parallel computations, processors must generally exchange data. This exchange of data has usually a great influence on the efficiency of the parallel programs because it introduces communication delays during the execution time. By contrast most commercial codes are sequential and hence it is recognised that the parallelisation of these codes must be simple and cost-effective. This fact implies that for parallel processing there may be a need for high-level subroutine libraries, to implement the interprocessor communication schemes. In this paper, some communication schemes for computational mechanics problems will be discussed and assessed which may be included in a communication subroutine library. With this library a sequential dynamic relaxation program can be transformed into a parallel one. Some form-finding results calculated using the parallel program will be presented.

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