Efficient parallel solvers for boundary element equations using data decomposition

Abstract The boundary element method (BEM) may be computationally expensive if complex problems are to be solved, thus there is the need for implementing it on fast computer architectures, especially parallel computers. One main aspect is the efficient parallel implementation for solvers for the linear system of equations which is dense and non-symmetric if a standard collocation method is used. In this paper, we discuss the numerical and parallel efficiency of various iterative solvers. Their parallel implementation on a distributed memory system (MIMD computer) is described. The parallelization is performed by data partitioning which leads to a very high efficiency. As a model problem, we assume linear elasticity but the parallelization strategy is well suited for other types of problems. The efficiency of our implementation is shown by test examples.