A parallel frontal solver for finite element applications

In nite element simulations, the overall computing time is dominated by the time needed to solve large sparse linear systems of equations. We report on the design and development of a parallel frontal code that can signi cantly reduce the wallclock time needed for the solution of these systems. The algorithm used is based on dividing the nite element domain into subdomains and applying the frontal method to each subdomain in parallel. The so-called multiple front approach is shown to reduce the amount of work and memory required compared with the frontal method and, when run on a small number of processes, achieves good speedups. The code, HSL MP42, has been developed for the Harwell Subroutine Library (http:==www.numerical.rl.ac.uk/hsl). It is written in Fortran 90 and, by using MPI for message passing, achieves portability across a wide range of modern computer architectures