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A Static Parallel Multifrontal Solver for Finite Element Meshes

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Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications (ISPA 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4330))

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Abstract

We present a static parallel implementation of the multifrontal method to solve unsymmetric sparse linear systems on distributed-memory architectures. We target Finite Element (FE) applications where numerical pivoting can be avoided, since an implicit minimum-degree ordering based on the FE mesh topology suffices to achieve numerical stability. Our strategy is static in the sense that work distribution and communication patterns are determined in a preprocessing phase preceding the actual numerical computation. To balance the load among the processors, we devise a simple model-driven partitioning strategy to precompute a high-quality balancing for a large family of structured meshes. The resulting approach is proved to be considerably more efficient than the strategies implemented by MUMPS and SuperLU_DIST, two state-of-the-art parallel multifrontal solvers.

Support for the authors was provided in part by MIUR of Italy under Project ALGO-NEXT and by the European Union under the FP6-IST/IP Project AEOLUS.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Alberto Bertoldo, Mauro Bianco & Geppino Pucci

Authors
  1. Alberto Bertoldo
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  2. Mauro Bianco
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  3. Geppino Pucci
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200030, Shanghai, China

    Minyi Guo

  2. Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Canada

    Laurence T. Yang

  3. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’ Informazione - Second, University of Naples - Italy, Real Casa dell’Annunziata, via Roma, 29 81031, Aversa (CE), Italy

    Beniamino Di Martino

  4. Institute of Scientific Computing, University of Vienna, Nordbergstr. 15/C/3, A-1090, Vienna, Austria/JPL, Caltech, USA

    Hans P. Zima

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Tennessee, TN 37996-3450, Knoxville, USA

    Jack Dongarra

  6. Grid Computing Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, 200240, Shanghai, China

    Feilong Tang

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bertoldo, A., Bianco, M., Pucci, G. (2006). A Static Parallel Multifrontal Solver for Finite Element Meshes. In: Guo, M., Yang, L.T., Di Martino, B., Zima, H.P., Dongarra, J., Tang, F. (eds) Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications. ISPA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4330. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11946441_67

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11946441_67

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68067-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68070-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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