An interactive parallel multigrid FEM simulator

Abstract

Interactively simulating nonlinear deformable human organs for surgical training and planning purposes demands high computational power which lacks in single processor machine. We build an interactive deformable objects simulator on a highly scalable computer cluster using nonlinear FEM and the novel multigrid explicit ODE solver which is stabler than single level schemes. The system consists of a graphical front end client on a workstation connected to a parallel simulation server that runs on a Linux cluster. After discussing the methodology in detail, the analysis of the speedup and preliminary results are presented. © Springer-Verlag 2004.