IMPROVING DOMAIN DECOMPOSITION FOR MULTIFRONTAL RESOLUTION OF MECHANICAL PROBLEMS: FINITE ELEMENT REORDERING AND LOAD BALANCING ISSUES

This discusses for the load balancing issues in the scope of the resolution of systems of linear equations encountered in large scale finite element problems. We first introduce the principle of a multifrontal solver. Then, some load balancing heuristics used by the numerical mechanics community are presented. We use an estimator of the computing time of the tasks of the multifrontal solver to measure the efficiency of our heuristics. Our tests on a collection of finite element meshes show the efficiency of the proposed method.