Computer Simulation of Multibody Dynamical Systems in a TeraGrid Environment

Despite the great growth in capability of computer hardware, the system size, complexity of structures, and time scales present in virtual prototyping of multibody dynamical systems will continue to challenge the field of computational multibody dynamics for the foreseeable future. In this paper, the scientific problems in virtual prototyping of multibody dynamical systems are articulated. Implementation of an efficient parallelizable algorithm on TeraGrid computing systems is further discussed. Various simulation cases and computing results are presented to demonstrate impact of the TeraGrid to the performance of the algorithm.