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

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to propose communication procedures suitable for unstructured finite element solvers implemented on distributed-memory parallel computers such as the Connection Machine CM-5 system. First, a data-parallel implementation of the recursive spectral bisection (RSB) algorithm proposed by Pothen et al. is presented. The RSB algorithm is associated with a node renumbering scheme which improves data locality of reference. Two-step gather and scatter operations taking advantage of this data locality are then designed. These communication primitives make use of the indirect addressing capability of the CM-5 vector units to achieve high gather and scatter bandwidths. The performance of the proposed communication strategy is illustrated on large-scale three-dimensional fluid dynamics problems.