Coarse Grain Parallel Finite Element Simulations for Incompressible Flows

Parallel simulation of incompressible fluid flows is considered on networks of homogeneous workstations. Coarse-grain parallelization of a Taylor–Galerkin/pressure–correction finite element algorithm are discussed, taking into account network communication costs. The main issues include the parallelization of system assembly, and iterative and direct solvers, that are of common interest to finite element and general numerical computation. The parallelization strategies are implemented on a Sun workstation cluster using the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) message passing library. Test results are obtained with a maximum of nineteen workstations and various PVM configurations are exhibited. Parallel efficiency close to ideal has been achieved for some strategies adopted. It is suggested that loadbalancing may not always be beneficial on distributed platforms with broadcasting communication connection. c © ??? John Wiley & Sons, Inc.