Parallel computations using a cluster of workstations to simulate elasticity problems

Computational physics has played important roles in real world problems. This paper is within the applied computational physics area. The aim of this study is to observe the performance of parallel computations using a cluster of workstations (COW) to simulate elasticity problems. Parallel computations with the COW configuration are conducted using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. In parallel computations with COW, we consider five scenarios with twenty simulations. In addition to the execution time, efficiency is used to evaluate programming algorithm scenarios. Sequential and parallel programming performances are evaluated based on their execution time and efficiency. Results show that the one-dimensional elasticity equations are not appropriate to be solved in parallel with MPI_Send and MPI_Recv technique in the MPI standard, because the total amount of time to exchange data is considered more dominant compared with the total amount of time to conduct the basic elasticity computation.