MASSIVELY-PARALLEL FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF COUPLED, INCOMPRESSIBLEFLOWS - A BENCHMARK COMPUTATION OF BAROCLINIC ANNULUS WAVES

Coupled, three-dimensional, time-dependent, incompressible flows in a differentially heated, rotating annulus are simulated using a parallel implementation of the Galerkin finite element method on the Connectio n Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer. The development of baroclinic annulu s waves is computed and found to be consistent with previous experimen tal reseults. The implementation of a repeated spectral bisection elem ent-partitioning technique significantly increases the computation spe ed over a strategy which randomly maps elements to processors, yieldin g sustained calculation rates of 8.1 GFLOPS on 512 processors of the C M-5.