A parallel fast boundary element method using cyclic graph decompositions

Abstract

We propose a method of a parallel distribution of densely populated matrices arising in boundary element discretizations of partial differential equations. In our method the underlying boundary element mesh consisting of n elements is decomposed into N submeshes. The related N×N submatrices are assigned to N concurrent processes to be assembled. Additionally we require each process to hold exactly one diagonal submatrix, since its assembling is typically most time consuming when applying fast boundary elements. We obtain a class of such optimal parallel distributions of the submeshes and corresponding submatrices by cyclic decompositions of undirected complete graphs. It results in a method the theoretical complexity of which is $O((n/\sqrt {N})\log (n/\sqrt {N}))$ in terms of time for the setup, assembling, matrix action, as well as memory consumption per process. Nevertheless, numerical experiments up to n=2744832 and N=273 on a real-world geometry document that the method exhibits superior parallel scalability $O((n/N)\,\log n)$ of the overall time, while the memory consumption scales accordingly to the theoretical estimate.