A multi-level frontal algorithm for finite element analysis and its implementation on parallel computation

This paper presents a multi-level frontal algorithm and its implementation and applications on parallel computation. A multi-frontal program is given which may be used for unsymmetric finite element matrix equations. The parallel program is developed on a cluster of workstations. The PVM (parallel virtual machine) system is used to handle communications among networked workstations. The method has advantages such as numbering of the finite element mesh in an arbitrary manner, simple programming organization, smaller core requirements and computation times. An implementation of this parallel method on workstations is discussed, the speedup and efficiency of this method being demonstrated and compared with general domain decomposition method based on band matrix methods by numerical examples.