Using Hybrid Parallel Programming Techniques for the Computation, Assembly and Solution Stages in Finite Element Codes

RODRIGO R. PAZ; MARIO A. STORTI; HUGO G. CASTRO; LISANDRO D. DALCÍN

LATIN AMERICAN APPLIED RESEARCH

PLAPIQUI(UNS-CONICET)

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2010

0327-0793

The so called ``hybrid parallelism paradigm´´, that combines programming techniques for architectures with distributed and shared memories using MPI (´Message Passing Interface´) and OpenMP (´Open Multi-Processing´) standards, is currently adopted to exploit the growing use of multi-core computers, thus improving the efficiency of codes in such architectures (several multi-core nodes or clustered symmetric multi-processors (SMP) connected by a fast net to do exhaustive computations). In this paper a parallel hybrid finite element code is developed and its performance is evaluated, using MPI for communication between cluster nodes and OpenMP for parallelism within the SMP nodes. An efficient thread-safe matrix library for computing element/cell residuals (or right hand sides) and Jacobians (or matrices) in FEM-like codes is introduced and fully described. The cluster in which the code was tested is the CIMEC´s ´Coyote´ cluster, which consists of eight-core computing nodes connected through Gigabit Ethernet.