Keywords: substructuring methods, asynchronous methods, iterative methods, parallel computing, distributed computing, fault tolerant..

This chapter presents the principles of asynchronous iterative methods and shows how these methods can be applied to the substructuring method. Asynchronous iterative methods are not used much today, but new needs arise from new hardware architectures – massively parallel supercomputers, clusters, grids, etc. – and asynchronous methods become a suitable solution for large scale computation. The major reason is that these methods are much less dependent on the interconnection latency and bandwidth. They could also be used for fault tolerant applications more easily and with less overhead than their synchronous counterparts. Unfortunately, the convergence of these algorithms is more demanding. This Chapter first introduces the asynchronous concept on simple iterative algorithms. Next the proof of the asynchronous convergence of the substructuring method is presented. Then, JACK, a library developed by the authors to ease implementing such asynchronous algorithms is introduced. Finally, a couple of numerical results, showing the robustness and efficiency of the proposed asynchronous substructuring method, are presented.

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