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

PAZ RODRIGO; STORTI MARIO; CASTRO, HUGO GUILLERMO; DALCÍN LISANDRO

LATIN AMERICAN APPLIED RESEARCH

PLAPIQUI(UNS-CONICET)

Lugar: Bahía Blanca; Año: 2011 vol. 41 p. 365 - 377

0327-0793

The so called “hybrid parallelism para- digm”, 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 clus- tered 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 intro- duced and fully described. The cluster in which the code was tested is the CIMEC’s ‘Coyote’ cluster, which consists of eight-core computing nodes con- nected through Gigabit Ethernet.