PARALLEL FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS USING JACOBI-CONDITIONED CONJUGATE-GRADIENT ALGORITHM

In this paper a modified parallel Jacobi-conditioned conjugate gradien t (CG) method is proposed for solving linear elastic finite element sy stem of equations. The conventional element-by-element and diagonally conditioned approaches are discussed with respect to parallel implemen tation on distributed memory MIMD architectures. The effects of commun ication overheads on the efficiency of the parallel CG solver are cons idered and it is shown that for the efficient performance of a paralle l CG solver, the interprocessor communication has to be carried out co ncurrently. A concurrent communication scheme is proposed by relating the semi-bandwidth of the stiffness matrix with the number of independ ent degrees of freedom and the number of processors and inducing direc tionalization of communication within the processor pipeline. With the aid of two examples the effectiveness of the proposed method is demon strated showing that the cost of communication remains low and relativ ely insensitive to the increase in the number of processors. Copyright (C) 1996 Civil-Comp Limited and Elsevier Science Limited.