A Parallel Hierarchical Solver for Finite Element Applications

Subject of the European Esprit project PARASOL is the development of fast parallel direct solvers and test of parallel iterative solvers on their applicability and robustness in an industrial framework. Target application codes are the CFD-code POLYFLOW, the structural analysis codes MSC/NASTRAN and DNV SESAM as well as the deep drawing code INDEED and the composite modelling code ARC3D. P-elements in MSC/NASTRAN linear static analysis of solid structures allow the polynomial degree of the base functions to be specified either globally or for each element. Discretisations with lower p-level can therefore be used as coarser grids for a multilevel iterative method. This paper presents a parallel version of such an iterative solver.