Parallel multilevel solution of Rayleigh-Benard-Marangoni problems

The Rayleigh-Benard-Marangoni problem for natural convection in a rectangul ar cavity with thermocapillary forces on a free surface is investigated usi ng a stream function-vorticity formulation. The,nonlinear system is iterati vely decoupled and high-degree p finite elements are used for the discretiz ation of the physical domain The linear systems arising from the discretiza tion at each iteration are solved using a spectral multilevel scheme, which is a natural preconditioner for high-p (spectral) elements. The spectral m ultilevel solver lends itself to parallelization in an element-by-element ( EBE) framework. Simulation results are presented and compared to previously published results. The multilevel El efficiency is compared to previous re sults for the driven cavity problem. Parallel performance studies are prese nted far the Gray T3E distributed memory architecture.