Optimization of element‐by‐element FEM in HPF 1.1

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this study, Poisson's equation is numerically evaluated by the element-by-element (EBE) finite-element method in a parallel environment using HPF 1.1 (High-Performance Fortran). In order to achieve high parallel efficiency, the data structures have been altered to node-based data instead of mixtures of node-and element-based data, representing a node-based EBE finite-element scheme (nEBE). The parallel machine used in this study was the NEC SX-4, and experiments were performed on a single node having 32 processors sharing common memory. The HPF compiler used in the experiments is HPF/SX Rev 2.0 released in 1997 (unofficial), which supports HPF 1.1. Models containing approximately 200 000 and 1 500 000 degrees of freedom were analyzed in order to evaluate the method. The calculation time, parallel efficiency, and memory used were compared. The performance of HPF in the conjugate gradient solver for the large model, using the NEC SX-4 compiler option -noshrunk, was about 85% that of the message passing interface.