Keywords: internet, information technology, distributed processing, simulation, structural models, structural analysis, grid computing.

In structural engineering, the finite element analysis has usually been carried out to model the building as a whole to obtain its overall reactions. In this kind of structural analysis, using simplified models to simulate a structure's components, such as beams or columns, is common and acceptable for engineers. However, due to the process of simplification, the detail response, such as stress distribution, are not available. On the other hand, many researchers use very fine meshes and various materials to build a structural component in order to realistically simulate its behavior in detail, without the relationship between the behavior and that of the rest of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to synchronize these two levels of knowledge under one platform, and that could provide a more realistic way to simulate engineering structural systems. The hierarchical modeling method [1] is one of the possible ways to incorporate these two scales of modeling of structural components, simplistic component models (SCM) with rigorous component models, into one single simulation.

Considering the computational energy, presently, internet computing, which is also called grid computing, is being perceived as a promising avenue to achieve further computational power. A simple one-level internet computing environment can be described as a massive collection of heterogeneous machines connected by comparatively slow, over-utilized communication channels. Since the existing parallel analysis algorithms are highly dependent for each distributed subtask and the frequency for the communication between each subtask could be huge. Although the internet can theoretically provide infinite computational power, however, it could be a bottleneck for the distributed structural simulation. To conquer this problem, an internet computing framework, in which a group of geographically distributed clusters connected by the internet, named cluster-to-cluster distributed computing environment, is proposed.

All in all, since the hierarchical modeling and simulation method is able to incorporate SCMs with rigorous component models (RCMs) in a structural system, the simulations of the RCMs, which synchronize with the SCMs, are then distributed amongst the proposed cluster-to-cluster computing environment. In this simulation scenario, a nice feature of the proposed computing method is that the internet communication only takes care of synchronization of the SCM and the RCM. As combined into one simulation platform, these two simulation methods naturally fit into each other such that the bottleneck induced by the internet computing becomes insignificant. In addition to the simulation methods, the development of such a software system is the main focus of this paper. Based on the proposed simulation methods, this paper also describes the system mechanisms for the simulation framework and the system design.

1

H.M. Chen, D. Iranata, "Realistic simulation of reinforced concrete structural systems with combine of simplified and rigorous component model", Structural Engineering and Mechanics, 30, 619-645, 2008.

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