An Efficient Communication Strategy for Finite Element Methods on the Connection Machine CM-5 System

Abstract

Performance of finite element solvers on parallel computers such as the Connection Machine CM-5 system is directly related to the efficiency of the communication strategy. The objective of this work is two-fold: First, we propose a data-parallel implementation of a partitioning algorithm used to decompose unstructured meshes. The mesh partitions are then mapped to the vector units of the CM-5. Second, we design gather and scatter operations taking advantage of data locality coming from the decomposition to reduce the communication time. This new communication strategy is available in the CMSSL. An example illustrates the performance of the proposed strategy.