Benchmarking Performance of an MPI-based Solver for 3D Elasticity Problems

Numerical solution of 3D linear elasticity equations is considered. Problem is described by a coupled system of second order elliptic partial differential equations. This system is discretized by trilinear parallelepipedal finite elements. Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient iterative method is used for solving large–scale linear algebraic systems arising after the Finite Element Method (FEM) discretization of the problem. The displacement decomposition technique is applied at the first step to construct a preconditioner using the decoupled block– diagonal part of the original matrix. Then circulant block– factorization is used to precondition thus obtained block– diagonal matrix. Since both preconditioning techniques, displacement decomposition and circulant block– factorization, are highly parallelizable, a portable parallel FEM code based on MPI is developed. Results of numerical tests performed on a number of modern parallel computers using real–life engineering problems from the geomechanics in geosciences are reported and discussed. 1