SUBDOMAIN GENERATION FOR NONCONVEX PARALLEL FINITE-ELEMENT DOMAINS

In this paper the Subdomain Generation Method (SGM), originally formul ated in Khan & Topping (1993; Khan, A. I. & Topping, B. H. V., Subdoma in generation for parallel finite element analysis. Comput. Syst. Engn g, 1993, 4(4/6), 473-488) for convex finite element domains, is genera lized for arbitrary shaped domains. Modifications to the original SGM are described which allow partitioning of non-convex domains. These mo difications have been made to the formulation of the optimization modu le and the predictive module. The examples presented in Khan & Topping (1993) have been re-worked and two more examples have been added whic h demonstrate the application of the method to arbitrary shaped domain s. It is shown with the aid of the examples that the method provides w ell-balanced subdomains very efficiently and allows parallel adaptive mesh generation. The method in its present form may be used to partiti on unstructured graphs in two or three dimensions. Since the computati onal cost for the mesh partitioning with this method depends solely up on the initial coarse mesh, hence the computational cost does not incr ease with the increase in the mesh density of the final mesh. The meth od in its present form is unsuitable for relatively coarse grained par allel computers, however the modifications which would impart a greate r degree of scalability to this method are discussed. Copyright (C) 19 96 Civil-Comp Limited and Elsevier Science Limited.