PARFES: A method for solving finite element linear equations on multi-core computers

The method suggested here is intended for solving sets of linear algebraic equations with symmetric sparse matrices. It is oriented at the usage in finite element analysis software operated on multi-core desktop computers. Algorithms of parallelization have been implemented which speed up the method intensively as more processors are added, both in the core memory mode and when using the hard disk storage. PARFES features a higher performance and speedup ability than the multi-frontal method do, because it requires a minimum amount of data transfers - actions that speed up poorly by parallelization available on multi-core desktop computers. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.