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Unstructured Mesh Computations on Networks of Workstations
Author(s) -
Jones Mark T.,
Plassmann Paul E.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
computer‐aided civil and infrastructure engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.773
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1467-8667
pISSN - 1093-9687
DOI - 10.1111/0885-9507.00184
Subject(s) - computer science , computation , workstation , parallel computing , interconnection , multiplication (music) , software , mesh generation , unstructured data , computational science , computer architecture , distributed computing , operating system , algorithm , computer network , finite element method , big data , engineering , physics , acoustics , structural engineering
Unstructured mesh technology can be used to create highly efficient scientific and engineering application software. Networks of workstations (NOWs) provide cost‐effective platforms for the timely solution of large problems in science and engineering. The performance of unstructured mesh computations on NOWs is investigated in this article. Several parallel unstructured mesh algorithms are shown informally to have computation and communication characteristics similar to those of parallel sparse matrix‐by‐vector multiplication. These characteristics are discussed, and the requirements they place on an interconnection network are described. Experimental data are given to summarize the communication parameters of four different NOW configurations. Finally, extensive empirical results are given to characterize the performance of unstructured mesh computations on the four NOWs.