Development of Common Software Platform on Parallel Computations for Discretized Numerical Schemes and its Application to Finite Element Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

It is a time consuming and very skillful task for researchers or developers on computational mechanics to modify a program for a single processor to the one for parallel computation. This is a serious bottleneck for parallel computation, even though general-purpose parallel computational library such as MPI is applied in his modification. We developed a parallel matrix solver platform, called ‘Parallel Computing Platform/PCP, based on domain de composition scheme for various numerical schemes such as finite element method (FEM), finite difference method (FDM) and finite volume method (FVM) to accelerate a smooth shift to parallel computational world. Some parallel software such as PETSc, Aztec, GEOFEM and ADVENTURE had been developed, however, these are for professionals in parallel computations and not valid for our purpose. In our platform, what a user should do is just to call the platform at the stage of stiffness matrix calculation. GMRES and Bi-CGSTAB with some pre-conditioners are used as a basic matrix solver. The option of Lagrange-multiplier is also attached. For the partitioning, a fast graph generator for arbitrary elements and the interface with MeTis are equipped. Our platform is valid for a variety of hardware, including single processor based WS, by exchanging Makefile.in. The effectiveness of our platform is evaluated with several examples in finite element fluid dynamics.

Keywords:

• Parallel computation
• Common platform
• Domain decomposition
• Free software

Acknowledgements

The software was developed jointly by AIST and FUJI RIC for the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) research and development project “Fundamental Research and Development for Research Information: Development of Parallel Computation Software Technology for Discretized Numerical Scheme” (1999–2001), and for the “Development of a Common Platform on Parallel Computations for Discretized Numerical Schemes” research project at the AIST's Tsukuba Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Notes

^† E-mail: [email protected]

^‡ email: [email protected]

^¶URL: http://www.fp.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/index.html

^§URL: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/CRF/aztec1.html

^∥URL: http://geofem.tokyo.rist.or.jp/index_jp.html

^#URL: http://adventure.q.t.u.tokyo.ac.jp/jp/

**URL: http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/la-sw.html

^††URL: http://www.users.cs.umn.edu/ ∼ karypis/metis/

^‡‡URL: http://www.aist.go.jp/infobase/pcp/index-en.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akira Tezuka