Highly Scalable Parallel Domain Decomposition Methods with an Application to Biomechanics

Highly scalable parallel domain decomposition methods for elliptic partial differential equations are considered with a special emphasis on problems arising in elasticity. The focus of this survey article is on Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) methods, a family of nonoverlapping domain decomposition methods where the continuity between the subdomains, in principle, is enforced by the use of Lagrange multipliers. Exact onelevel and dual-primal FETI methods as well as related inexact dual-primal variants are described and theoretical convergence estimates are presented together with numerical results confirming the parallel scalability properties of these methods. New aspects such as a hybrid onelevel FETI/FETI-DP approach and the behavior of FETI-DP for anisotropic elasticity problems are presented. Parallel and numerical scalability of the methods for more than 65 000 processor cores of the JUGENE supercomputer is shown. An application of a dual-primal FETI method to a nontrivial biomechanical problem from nonlinear elasticity modeling arterial wall stress is given, showing the robustness of our domain decomposition methods for such problems.