Multifrontal parallel distributed symmetric and unsymmetric solvers

We consider the solution of both symmetric and unsymmetric systems of spars e linear equations. A new parallel distributed memory multifrontal approach is described. To handle numerical pivoting efficiently, a parallel asynchr onous algorithm with dynamic scheduling of the computing tasks has been dev eloped. We discuss some of the main algorithmic choices and compare both im plementation issues and the performance of the LDLT and LU factorizations. Performance analysis on an IBM SP2 shows the efficiency and the potential o f the method. The test problems used are from the Rutherford-Boeing collect ion and from the PARASOL end users. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All righ ts reserved.