FINITE-ELEMENT ELECTROMAGNETIC-FIELD COMPUTATION ON THE SEQUENT SYMMETRY 81 PARALLEL COMPUTER

Finite element field analysis algorithms lend themselves ideally to parallelization and this fact is exploited in this paper to implement a finite element analysis program for electromagnetic field computation on the Sequent Symmetry 81 Parallel Computer with three processors. In terms of waiting time, the maximum gains are to be made in matrix solution and therefore this paper concentrates on the gains in parallelizing the solution part of finite element analysis. An outline of how parallelization could be exploited in most finite element operations is given in this paper although the actual implemention of parallelism on the Sequent Symmetry 81 parallel computer was in Sparsity Computation, Matrix Assembly and the matrix solution areas. In all cases, the algorithms were modified suit the parallel programming application rather than allowing the compiler to parallelize an existing algorithm. © 1990, IEEE. All rights reserved.