Publications Details

A massively parallel adaptive finite element method with dynamic load balancing

Wheat, S.R.

We construct massively parallel, adaptive finite element methods for the solution of hyperbolic conservation laws in one and two dimensions. Spatial discretization is performed by a discontinuous Galerkin finite element method using a basis of piecewise Legendre polynomials. Temporal discretization utilizes a Runge-Kutta method. Dissipative fluxes and projection limiting prevent oscillations near solution discontinuities. The resulting method is of high order and may be parallelized efficiently on MIMD computers. We demonstrate parallel efficiency through computations on a 1024-processor nCUBE/2 hypercube. We also present results using adaptive p-refinement to reduce the computational cost of the method. We describe tiling, a dynamic, element-based data migration system. Tiling dynamically maintains global load balance in the adaptive method by overlapping neighborhoods of processors, where each neighborhood performs local load balancing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the dynamic load balancing with adaptive p-refinement examples.