Networking of personal computers and workstations is becoming commonplace in academic and industrial environments. A cluster of workstations provides engineers with a familiar, cost-effective environment for high performance computing. However, workstations often have no dedicated link and communicate slowly on a local area network (LAN), such as the Ethernet. Thus, to effectively harness the parallel processing or distributed computing capabilities of workstations, new algorithms need to be developed with a higher computation-to-communication ratio.
Distributed Computer-Aided Engineering presents distributed algorithms for three fundamental areas: finite element analysis, design optimization, and visualization - providing a new direction in high performance structural engineering computing.