A parallel adaptive finite-element package based on ALBERTA

Abstract

ALBERTA, a sequential adaptive finite-element toolbox, is being used widely in the fields of scientific and engineering computation, especially in the numerical simulation of electromagnetics. But the nature of sequentiality has become the bottle-neck while solving large scale problems. So we develop a parallel adaptive finite-element package based on ALBERTA, using ParMETIS and PETSc. The package is able to deal with any problem that ALBERT solved. Furthermore, it is suitable for distributed memory parallel computers including PC clusters. In this paper, we present the implementation of the package in detail, and address several key algorithms and strategies of parallelization. Finally, some numerical experiments are given to show the performance and scalability of our package.