Parallelization of spectral element methods

Abstract

Spectral element methods allow for effective implementation of numerical techniques for partial differential equations on parallel architectures. We present two implementations of the parallel algorithm where the communications are performed using MPI. In the first implementation, each processor deals with one element. It leads to a natural parallelization. In the second implementation certain number of spectral elements are allocated to each processor. In this article, we describe how communications are implemented and present results and performance of the code on two architectures: a PC-Cluster and an IBM-SP3. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.