General Parallel Finite and Spectral-Element Oriented C/C plus plus Framework

This work deals with the design and implementation of a highly modular and flexible software framework to implement numerical models based on the finite element method (FEM) and its extension to deal with distributed problems. We present the improvement of previous implementations by the addition of parallel calculations capabilities by means of the substructure technique applied to solve problems by the FEM in clusters of computers using the message passing interface (MPI) protocol. We use a general Poisson problem with known solution as a test case to conduct experiments in order to validate this implementation and evaluate the scaling capabilities of our code. Two alternatives of solving the global problem are analysed, by means of direct and iterative solvers. Conclusions are extracted with focus on future lines of development.