PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT LINEAR EQUATION SOLVERS FOR SOLVING NONLINEAR FE PROBLEMS ON MULTICORE ARCHITECTURES

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of existing parallel linear equation solvers to solving large-scale, nonlinear finite element analysis problems on systems with distributed memory. The parallel approach allows us to take an advantage of the distributed memory enabling forming large system matrices and of multiple processing units to achieve significant speedups. Our study is based on comparison of parallel direct solver and parallel iterative solver implemented in SuperLU DIST library from Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc). Both considered solvers are designed for distributed system memory model and are based on a Massage Passing Interface (MPI). The efficiency of individual solvers is evaluated on a selected benchmark problems, with different solution strategies by comparing computation times and obtained speedups.