Coarse grain parallel finite element simulations for incompressible flows

Parallel simulation of incompressible uid ows is considered on networks of homogeneous workstations. Coarse-grain parallelization of a Taylor{Galerkin=pressure-correction nite element algorithm are discussed, taking into account network communication costs. The main issues include the parallelization of system assembly, and iterative and direct solvers, that are of common interest to nite element and general numerical computation. The parallelization strategies are implemented on a Sun workstation cluster using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) message passing library. Test results are obtained with a maximum of nineteen workstations and various PVM con gurations are exhibited. Parallel e ciency close to ideal has been achieved for some strategies adopted. It is suggested that load balancing may not always be bene cial on distributed platforms with broadcasting communication connection