V.E. Taylor, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
J. Chen, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
T. Canfield, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
R. Stevens, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
The interconnection of geographically distributed supercomputers via highspeed networks makes available the needed compute power for large-scale scientific applications, such as finite element applications. In this paper we propose a two-level data decomposition method for efficient execution of finite element applications on a network of supercomputers. Our method exploits the following features that may be different for each supercomputer in the system: processor speed, number of processors used from each supercomputer, local network performance, wide area network performance and wide area topology. Preliminary experiments involving a nonlinear, finite element application executed on a network of two supercomputers, one located at Argonne National Laboratory and the other one at the Cornell Theory Center, demonstrate a 20% reduction in execution time when the proposed decomposition is used as compared with naively applying conventional decompositions that are applicable to single supercomputers.
Index Terms:
parallel machines; finite element analysis; distributed processing; decomposition method; distributed supercomputers; finite element applications; highspeed networks; large-scale scientific applications; processor speed; local network performance; wide area network performance; wide area topology
Citation:
V.E. Taylor, J. Chen, T. Canfield, R. Stevens, "A Decomposition Method For Efficient Use Of Distributed Supercomputers For Finite Element Applications," asap, pp.12, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP'96), 1996