Abstract: The geometrically nonlinear finite element analysis forcylindrical shells is carried out using the 16-node curvilinear side isoparametricelement. The analysis takes into accout of fully nonlinear kinematic relations sothat the stable equilibrium paths in the advanced nonlinear regime can beaccurately predicted. A general nonlinear displacement-based finite elementformulation is established. The parallel strategies for the nonlinear finiteelement analysis based on the total Lagrangian formulation are presented andimplemented on the workstation cluster. The geometrically nonlinearanalysis for cylindrical shells is performed using parallel computing.The results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better parallelspeedup and efficiency under the cluster environment.