The
Finite Element Machine (FEM) was a late 1970s-early 1980s
NASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
project to build and evaluate the performance of a parallel computer for
structural analysisStructural analysis is the determination of the effects of loads on physical structures and their components. Structures subject to this type of analysis include all that must withstand loads, such as buildings, bridges, vehicles, machinery, furniture, attire, soil strata, prostheses and...
. The FEM was completed and successfully tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in
Hampton, VirginiaHampton is an independent city that is not part of any county in Southeast Virginia. Its population is 137,436. As one of the seven major cities that compose the Hampton Roads metropolitan area, it is on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula. Located on the Hampton Roads Beltway, it hosts...
. The motivation for FEM arose from the merger of two concepts: the
finite element methodThe finite element method is a numerical technique for finding approximate solutions of partial differential equations as well as integral equations...
of
structural analysisStructural analysis is the determination of the effects of loads on physical structures and their components. Structures subject to this type of analysis include all that must withstand loads, such as buildings, bridges, vehicles, machinery, furniture, attire, soil strata, prostheses and...
and the introduction of relatively low-cost microprocessors.
In the finite element method, the behavior (stresses, strains and displacements resulting from load conditions) of large-scale structures is approximated by an FE model consisting of structural elements (members) connected at structural node points. Calculations on traditional computers are performed at each node point and results communicated to adjacent node points until the behavior of the entire structure is computed. On the Finite Element Machine, microprocessors located at each node point perform these nodal computations in parallel. If there are more node points (N) than microprocessors (P), then each microprocessor performs N/P computations. The Finite Element Machine contained 32 processor boards each with a
Texas Instruments TMS9900Introduced in June 1976 and based on the Texas Instruments 990 minicomputer CPU, the TMS9900 was one of the first true 16-bit microprocessors...
processor, 32
Input/OutputIn computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
(IO) boards and a TMS99/4 controller. The FEM was conceived and fabricated at NASA Langley Research Center,
Hampton, VirginiaHampton is an independent city that is not part of any county in Southeast Virginia. Its population is 137,436. As one of the seven major cities that compose the Hampton Roads metropolitan area, it is on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula. Located on the Hampton Roads Beltway, it hosts...
. The TI 9900 processor chip was selected by the NASA team as it was the first 16-bit processor available on the market which until then was limited to less powerful
8-bitThe first widely adopted 8-bit microprocessor was the Intel 8080, being used in many hobbyist computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often running the CP/M operating system. The Zilog Z80 and the Motorola 6800 were also used in similar computers...
processors. The FEM concept was successfully tested to solve beam bending equations on a Langley FEM
prototypeA prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος , "original, primitive", from πρῶτος , "first" and τύπος ,...
(4 IMSAI 8080s) which led to full-scale FEM fabrication & testing by the FEM hardware-software-applications team led by Dr. Olaf O. Storaasli formerly of NASA (now at
Oak Ridge National LaboratoryOak Ridge National Laboratory is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the DOE's largest science and energy laboratory. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville...
).
The first significant Finite Element Machine results are documented in: The Finite Element Machine: An experiment in parallel processing (NASA TM 84514)
Based on the Finite Element Machine's success in demonstrating Parallel Computing viability, (alongside ILLIAC IVThe ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous supercomputers ever built. One of a series of research machines, the ILLIACs from the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC IV design featured fairly high parallelism with up to 256 processors, used to allow the machine to work on large data sets in what...
and Goodyear MPPThe Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor was amassively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospacefor the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than...
), commercial parallel computers soon emerged on the market. NASA Langley subsequently purchased a Flex/32 Multicomputer (and later Intel iPSCThe Intel iPSC is a parallel computer. It was superseded by the Intel iPSC/2. iPSC also more generally refers to the particular line of Intel parallel computers, which includes the iPSC/2 and the iPSC/860. Acronym "iPSC" means "Intel Personal SuperComputer"....
and Intel ParagonThe Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely...
) to continue parallel finite element algorithmIn mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...
R&D. In 1989, the parallel equation solver code, first prototyped on FEM, and tested on FLEX was ported to NASA's first Cray YMP via Force (Fortran for Concurrent Execution) to reduce the structural analysis computation time for the space shuttle Challenger Solid Rocket Booster resdesign with 54,870 equations from 14 hours to 6 seconds. This research accomplishment was awarded the first Cray GigaFLOP Award at Supercomputing '89. This code evolved into NASA's General-Purpose Solver (GPS) for Matrix Equations used in numerous finite element codes to speed solution time. GPS sped up AlphaStar Corporation's Genoa code 10X, allowing 10X larger applications for which the team received NASA's 1999 Software of the Year Award .
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