Linear Algebra Considerations for the Multi-Threaded Simulation of Mechanical Systems

A solution method suitable for the multi-threaded simulation ofmechanical systems represented in Cartesian coordinates isproposed and analyzed. In a state-space framework for thesolution of the Differential Algebraic Equations (DAE) ofMultibody Dynamics, the position/velocity stabilization and theacceleration computation are based on iterative solvers applied toequivalent reduced problems. The most in-depth computationalaspect analyzed is the preconditioning, i.e., the direct solutionof the reduced systems. Provided a topology index reduction is first applied to the model, the effort for the direct solution of the reduced systems is shown to be of order O(N_J), where N_Jis the number of joints in the model. The recurring theme of thepaper is the central role that the topology of the mechanicalsystem plays in the overall performance of the numericalsimulation. Based on the topology of the model, parallelcomputational threads can be established to start in the equationformulation and continue through the iterative numericalalgorithms employed for the numerical solution. Task schedulingthese parallel threads is expected to redeem real-time performancefor certain classes of complex applications.