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Title: Performance analysis of high quality parallel preconditioners applied to 3D finite element structural analysis

Conference ·
OSTI ID:223863

The solution of large systems of linear equations is a crucial bottleneck when performing 3D finite element analysis of structures. Also, in many cases the reliability and robustness of iterative solution strategies, and their efficiency when exploiting hardware resources, fully determine the scope of industrial applications which can be solved on a particular computer platform. This is especially true for modern vector/parallel supercomputers with large vector length and for modern massively parallel supercomputers. Preconditioned iterative methods have been successfully applied to industrial class finite element analysis of structures. The construction and application of high quality preconditioners constitutes a high percentage of the total solution time. Parallel implementation of high quality preconditioners on such architectures is a formidable challenge. Two common types of existing preconditioners are the implicit preconditioners and the explicit preconditioners. The implicit preconditioners (e.g. incomplete factorizations of several types) are generally high quality but require solution of lower and upper triangular systems of equations per iteration which are difficult to parallelize without deteriorating the convergence rate. The explicit type of preconditionings (e.g. polynomial preconditioners or Jacobi-like preconditioners) require sparse matrix-vector multiplications and can be parallelized but their preconditioning qualities are less than desirable. The authors present results of numerical experiments with Factorized Sparse Approximate Inverses (FSAI) for symmetric positive definite linear systems. These are high quality preconditioners that possess a large resource of parallelism by construction without increasing the serial complexity.

Research Organization:
Front Range Scientific Computations, Inc., Boulder, CO (United States); US Department of Energy (USDOE), Washington DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
OSTI ID:
223863
Report Number(s):
CONF-9404305-Vol.1; ON: DE96005735; TRN: 96:002320-0037
Resource Relation:
Conference: Colorado conference on iterative methods, Breckenridge, CO (United States), 5-9 Apr 1994; Other Information: PBD: [1994]; Related Information: Is Part Of Colorado Conference on iterative methods. Volume 1; PB: 203 p.
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English