[BANANA] Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar - Tuesday, 7/1/2008, 1:00pm

[Esmond G. Ng]

Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:  Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Time:  1:00pm-2:00pm  

Location:  Building 50F, 1647 Conference Room

Seminar Speaker:
    Tobias Gradl
    Department Informatik
    Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Title:  A Multigrid Solver for Massively Parallel Finite Element 
Computations

Abstract:

Among the various discretization methods in numerical simulation, Finite 
Elements are often favoured for their flexibility when unstructured 
meshes are required. As supercomputers have never performed very well on 
unstructured data, block-structured approaches have always enjoyed 
attention. HHG ("Hierarchical Hybrid Grids") is a Multigrid solver for 
hierarchically structured meshes. It is designed to solve very large 
simulations on massively parallel computers. Having solved a problem 
with 10^11 unknowns in 1.5 minutes on 9170 cores of an SGI Altix, it 
currently keeps the world record in Finite Element linear system 
solving. Using a consistent Multigrid approach is a crucial factor at 
these problem sizes, because Multigrid methods are the only solvers that 
scale linearly with the number of unknowns. During my three-month stay 
at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, I would like to make HHG fit for the upcoming 
generations of ever larger and increasingly diverse supercomputers. I am 
looking forward to many fruitful discussions with everyone who wants to 
share some knowledge about parallel performance analysis and tuning.

Sponsor of Seminar:  Erich Strohmaier