Abstract: The parallel strategies of finite element method, the distributed storage of abundant data, the convergence speed of iterative solution of large scale linear equations and the implementation of parallel finite element method are discussed. We use domain decomposition method (“divide and conquer” strategy) to achieve the parallization of FEM. In combination of domain decomposition strategy, we store the data linking with each subdomain in each processor. So the data locality not only can reduce the communication, but also increase the scale of the computation. We adopt Schur complement and preconditioning conjugated gradient (PCG) method to fulfill parallel solution of linear equations with bad condition number. We utilize object-oriented programming method to develop our parallel FEM software. Two examples are given to discuss the efficiency of the parallel software. The results show that the software has high performance.

Key words: parallel finite element method, domain decomposition, geotechnical engineering