Parallelization of the distinct lattice spring model

The distinct lattice spring model (DLSM) is a newly developed numerical tool for modeling rock dynamics problems, i.e. dynamic failure and wave propagation. In this paper, parallelization of DLSM is presented. With the development of parallel computing technologies in both hardware and software, parallelization of a code is becoming easier than before. There are many available choices now. In this paper, Open Multi‐Processing (OpenMP) with multicore personal computer (PC) and message passing interface (MPI) with cluster are selected as the environments to parallelize DLSM. Performances of these parallel DLSM codes are tested on different computers. It is found that the parallel DLSM code with OpenMP can reach a maximum speed‐up of 4.68× on a quad‐core PC. The parallel DLSM code with MPI can achieve a speed‐up of 40.886× when 256 CPUs are used on a cluster. At the end of this paper, a high‐resolution model with four million particles, which is too big to handle by the serial code, is simulated by using the parallel DLSM code on a cluster. It is concluded that the parallelization of DLSM is successful. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.