Tuning the Schur complement computations for finite element partitions

The domain decomposition method (DDM) is an efficient algorithmic tool for the parallelization of finite element computer codes. A variant of the DDM with direct solution algorithm is based on computation of Schur complement matrices for finite element partitions. This paper describes a simple techn ique that considerably improves execution rate of computationally intensive routines of the Schur complement computations, The technique uses 'block o f columns' matrix operations and loop unrolling to reduce load instructions from cache memory and to increase instruction-level parallelism. For super scalar RISC processors, experimental results show that it is possible to im prove performance of the DDM solution procedure by several times. (C) 2000 Civil-Comp Ltd. and Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.