Parallel performance of a preconditioned CG solver for unstructured finite element applications

Conference · Wed Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 1994

OSTI ID:10159901

Shadid, J N; Hutchinson, S A; Moffat, H K

A parallel unstructured finite element (FE) implementation designed for message passing machines is described. This implementation employs automated problem partitioning algorithms for load balancing unstructured grids, a distributed sparse matrix representation of the global finite element equations and a parallel conjugate gradient (CG) solver. In this paper a number of issues related to the efficient implementation of parallel unstructured mesh applications are presented. These include the differences between structured and unstructured mesh parallel applications, major communication kernels for unstructured CG solvers, automatic mesh partitioning algorithms, and the influence of mesh. partitioning metrics on parallel performance. Initial results are presented for example finite element (FE) heat transfer analysis applications on a 1024 processor nCUBE 2 hypercube. Results indicate over 95% scaled efficiencies are obtained for some large problems despite the required unstructured data communication.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 10159901
• Report Number(s): SAND--94-1477C; CONF-9404103--2; ON: DE94013772; BR: GB0103012
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200
ARRAY PROCESSORS
FINITE ELEMENT METHOD
HEAT TRANSFER
ITERATIVE METHODS
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS
MESH GENERATION
PARALLEL PROCESSING