Distributed processing of FEM in a local area network [magnetostatics]

The first experiences of the authors in distributed processing of the finite-element method in local area networks (LANs) are described. A procedure for solving finite element problems has been implemented on five DEC computers within such a network. The principal idea is to subdivide the whole problem into substructures and to eliminate the interior nodes of those in parallel autonomous processes by frontal techniques. The aim is to keep the resulting system of equations as small as possible, so that this resulting set of equations can be solved on one processor by ICGG (incomplete choleski conjugate gradient) method in an acceptable time. As another application of distributed processing, higher evolution strategies for optimization problems in a finite-element context have been parallelized. It is concluded that substructuring as a means of performing parallel processing on a LAN is only of interest for large 2-D problems