Practical Issues of 2-D Parallel Finite Element Analysis

The use of parallel processors has made it possible to execute large scale applications such as finite element analysis. Generally, the speedup is limited by the interprocessor communication used by message-passing multicomputers. The major question addressed by users of message-passing machines is the identification, of the most efficient type of communication scheme for the. particular application. Practical considerations such as the following are frequently neglected: the range of message sizes for which a communication scheme is appropriate, the impact on the subdomain size, the. memory requirements versus the actual memory of the machine, and how the optimal communication method changes as a fixed size problem is scaled to a larger number of processors. We address these practical issues for 2-D finite, element problems executed on the Intel Delta machine.