Computational results for parallel unstructured mesh computations

Abstract

The majority of finite element models in structural engineering are composed of unstructured meshes. These unstructured meshes are often very large and require significant computation resources; hence they are excellent candidates for massively parallel computation. Parallel solution of the sparse matrices that arise from such meshes has been studied heavily, and many good algorithms have been developed. Unfortunately, many of the other aspects of parallel unstructured mesh computation have gone largely ignored. We present a set of algorithms that all the entire unstructured mesh computation process to execute in parallel—including adaptive mesh refinement, equation reordering, mesh partitioning, and sparse linear system solution. We briefly describe these algorithms and state results regarding their running-time and performance. We then give results from the 512-processor Intel DELTA for a large-scale structural analysis problem. The results demonstrate that the new algorithms are scalable and efficient. The algorithms are able to achieve up to 2.2 gigaflops for this unstructured mesh problem.