A PETSc-based parallel implementation of finite element method for elasticity problems

Abstract

Starting a parallel code from scratch is not a good choice for parallel programming finite element analysis of elasticity problems because we cannot make full use of our existing serial code and the programming work is painful for developers. PETSc provides libraries for various numerical methods that can give us more flexibility in migrating our serial application code to a parallel implementation. We present the approach to parallelize the existing finite element code within the PETSc framework. Our approach permits users to easily implement the formation and solution of linear system arising from finite element discretization of elasticity problem. The main PETSc subroutines are given for the main parallelization step and the corresponding code fragments are listed. Cantilever examples are used to validate the code and test the performance.