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

Conference · Sat Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:219560

Shadid, J N; Hutchinson, S A; Moffat, H K ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States)

A parallel unstructured finite element (FE) implementation designed for message passing MIMD 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: Front Range Scientific Computations, Inc., Boulder, CO (United States); USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-76DP00789
• OSTI ID: 219560
• Report Number(s): CONF-9404305--Vol.2; ON: DE96005736
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
EFFICIENCY
FINITE ELEMENT METHOD
ITERATIVE METHODS
PARALLEL PROCESSING