PARALLEL PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY FOR BLOCK PRECONDITIONED FINITE-ELEMENT (P) SOLUTION OF VISCOUS-FLOW

A two-dimensional p-type finite element scheme for distributed parallel computation of viscous flows is developed: The approach is based on an element-by-element implementation of the Biconjugate Gradient Stabilized 2 iterative method coupled with a recently developed class of block preconditioners. Critical to the overall parallel performance is the parallel solution of the imbedded bilinear preconditioner. performance results are presented for the 2-D driven cavity incompressible viscous flow problem solved using incremental continuation in the Reynolds number on the Intel Touchstone Delta. These results are used to validate a run-time model. The run-time model is then used to examine the scaling properties of the method over a range of p and h.