An integrated approach for the parallel solution of large sparse systems arisen in finite element computations is presented. The approach includes a three-phase preprocessor and a macro dataflow execution scheme. The three phases of the preprocessor are: (1) Extracting parallelism by means of an automatic domain decomposer; (2) Building the distributed data structure and (partial) scheduling for parallel computation during symbolic factorization; (3) Assigning processes (tasks) onto processors. The proposed approach has been implemented in the finite element analysis software package DIANA. Experimental results show that this integrated approach is an efficient method for both shared-and distributed-memory parallel systems.
['Hai-Xiang Lin', 'Henk J. Sips']
Parallel direct solution of large sparse systems in finite element computations