Paper submitted to : Third National Symposium on Large - Scale Structural Analysis for High - Performance Computers and Workstations Computational Results for Parallel Unstructured Mesh Cornput at ionst

The majority of finite element models in structural engineering are composed of unstructured meshes. These unstructured meshes are often very large and require significant computational resources; hence they are excellent candidates for massively parallel computation. Parallel solution of the sparse matrices that arise from such meshes has been studied heavily, and many good algorithms have been developed. Unfortunately, many of the other aspects of parallel unstructured mesh computation have gone largely ignored. We present a set of algorithms that allow the entire unstructured mesh computation process to execute in parallel-including adaptive mesh refinement, equation reordering, mesh partitioning, and sparse h e a r system solution. We briefly describe these algorithms and state results regarding their running-time and performance. We then give results from the 512-processor Intel DELTA for a large-scale structu rd analysis problem. These results demonstrate that the new algorithms are scalable and efficient. The algorithms are able to achieve up to 2.2 gigaflops for this unstructured mesh problem. tThis work w a s supported in part by the Ofice of Scientific Computing, US. Department of Energy, under Contract w-31-1 09-Eng-38. In addition, the first author received support from the 1994-1995 UTI< Professional Development Award Program. nonewIuiive. royalty-free license to prblerh or mPrGduce the published form of thar contribution, or allow others to do so, for U. S. Government purposes. I -