A DIRECT PARALLEL SPARSE-MATRIX SOLVER

The direct sparse matrix solver is based on a domain decomposition tec hnique to achieve data and work parallelization. Geometries that have long and thin structures are specially efficiently tractable with this solver, provided that they can be decomposed mainly in one direction. Due to the separation of the algorithm into a factorization stage and a solution stage, time-dependent problems with a constant coefficient matrix are particularly well suited for this solver. The parallelizat ion performances obtained on a Gray T3D show that the method scales up to at least 256 processors.