Parallelizing FLITE3D - a multigrid finite element Euler solver

FLITE3D is a multigrid Euler solver. It is used extensively by British Aero space in aircraft design and simulation. This paper presents experiences in parallelizing this industrial code. Owing to the employment of an agglomer ation-based multigrid technique, the communication overhead on the coarser meshes could readily erode any gain from the use of parallel computers. The parallelization of the code therefore required careful design and implemen tation. The strategy adopted in the parallelization of the code, including the use of data structures and communication primitives, is described. Nume rical results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the resulting parallel code. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.