Performance of unstructured finite element reacting flow computations on parallel supercomputers

John N. Shadid, Andrew G. Salinger, Scott A. Hutchinson, Karen D. Devine, Gary L. Hennigan, Harry K. Moffat

Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185

Abstract
A parallel unstructured finite element (FE) reacting flow solver designed for message passing MIMD computers is discussed. This implementation employs automated partitioning algorithms for load balancing unstructured grids, a distributed sparse matrix representation of the global finite element equations, and parallel Krylov subspace iterative solvers. In this talk a number of issues related to the efficient implementation of parallel unstructured mesh applications are presented. Results are presented for example finite element (FE) heat transfer, fluid flow and full reacting flow applications on a 1024-processor nCUBE 2 hypercube and a 1904-processor Intel Paragon.