VECTOR CONCURRENT COMPUTATIONS OF EXPLICIT FINITE ELEMENT PROCESSES

This paper reports observation made through an on-going programming project of a finite element package for viscous, incompressible fluid flow calculations. Attempting to utilize the performance of modern computer architecture to its full extent, experiments are carried out using a prototype software on a machine with the vector processors running concurrently. As the hardware platform, an Alliant FX/8 computer with 4 CE (Computational Elements) is used to measure the performance of the prototype software. The main objective of this exercise is to construct a fast and robust software for a wide range of fluid mechanics applications. The current version of the prototype code uses an implicit finite element solution for the steady incompressible flows. The possibility of using the explicit finite element processes is being investigated to meet this requirement in particular for the solution of large numerical models in three dimensions which are beyond the limit of implicit finite element processes.