Finite element machine

The Finite Element Machine (FEM) was a late 1970s-early 1980s NASA project to build and evaluate the performance of a parallel computer for structural analysis.

The FEM was completed and successfully tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

[1] The motivation for FEM arose from the merger of two concepts: the finite element method of structural analysis and the introduction of relatively low-cost microprocessors.

On the Finite Element Machine, microprocessors located at each node point perform these nodal computations in parallel.

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[2] (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.