CONCURRENT BOUNDARY-ELEMENT COMPUTATION

A major limitation of the boundary element method (BEM) for the solution of electrical potential problems is the long computational time required. However, a large portion of the calculations involved can be viewed as being parallel in nature and can therefore be computed concurrently. This paper makes an effort to increase the efficiency of the BEM process using transputer-based multiprocessor computing techniques. The algorithms developed may equally well be applied to any multiprocessor system. The application selected to demonstrate the technique is the solution of an electrostatic problem governed by a two-dimensional Laplace equation. A parallel algorithm for problem setup and field extraction using BEM is designed and implemented on a transputer array. Special attention is directed to the utilization of the parallel processors to achieve maximum efficiency. The analysis in this work concentrates on the communication strategies for passing data between processors as well as a consideration of the workload attributed to each processor. The parallel algorithms were implemented using 3L Parallel Fortran; however, the choice of topology for the overall BEM implementation was limited by the fact that certain parts of the algorithm could only utilize a pipeline configuration of processors. Comprehensive results for the parallel BEM algorithm are given and they are encouraging, indicating that parallel processing has much to offer when applied to the boundary element method.