by Chris Greenough and Ron Fowler
The use of computing systems with some type of parallel architecture has grown significantly over the past few years. These systems are increasing being seen as the major way by which sufficient affordable computing power can be provided for the advanced engineering simulations now being attempted in fluid dynamics, stress analysis and electromagnetism. These simulations typically use meshes or grids containing 500,000 nodes and use the process of automatic grid refinement during the solution.
Many of the parallel machines being used are based on an MIMD form of parallelism where the memory of the machine is distributed over a network of processors. A consequence of this is that the program and its associated data must be distributed between these processors. In finite volume and finite element methods this leads to the problem of how to distribute large unstructured grids and meshes initially, and how to redistribute them subsequently.
The PPMUM Project intends to address the development new partitioning and mesh redistribution methods for the parallel implementation of finite element analyses.
This research project intends to address and advance three elements of this problem:
Software implementations of the new algorithms developed will be integrated into a large existing applications program to test their effectiveness.
rutherford.ac.ukinf.rl.ac.uk