A parallel hp-FEM infrastructure for three-dimensional structural acoustics

This paper describes a parallel three-dimensional numerical infrastructure for the solution of a wide range of time-harmonic problems in structural acoustics and vibration. High accuracy and rate of error-convergence, in the mid-frequency regime,is achieved by the use of hp-finite and infinite element approximations. The infrastructure supports parallel computation in both single and multi-frequency settings. Multi-frequency solves utilize concurrent factoring of the frequency-dependent linear algebraic systems and are naturally scalable. Scalability of large-scale single-frequency problems is realized by using FETI-DP—an iterative domain-decomposition scheme. Numerical examples are presented to cover applications in vibratory response of fluid-filled elastic structures as well as radiation and scattering from elastic structures submerged in an infinite acoustic medium. We demonstrate both the numerical accuracy as well as parallel scalability of the infrastructure in terms of problem parameters that include wavenumber and number of frequencies, polynomial degree of finite/infinite element approximations as well as the number of processors. Scalability and accuracy is evaluated for both single and multiple frequency sweeps on four high-performance parallel computing platforms: SGI Altix, SGI Origin, IBM p690 SP and Linux-cluster. Results show good performance on shared as well as distributed-memory architecture. Copyright 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd