Programming substructure computations for elliptic problems on the CHiP system

Abstract

A number of studies have been conducted with the aim to apply parallel computation to problems associated with solving finite element equations arising in structural mechanics and fluid dynamics. These studies have provided many important results. The present investigation is concerned with a set of experiments designed to test two ideas, including configurability and substructuring. The considered algorithms and tests are intended for implementation on the Configurable, Highly Parallel (CHiP) family of architecture described by Snyder (1982). The ChiP computer is composed of homogeneous processing elements (PEs) placed at regular intervals in a lattice of programmable switches. Two examples of the role of configurability and substructuring for simple iterative algorithms are considered, giving attention to conjugate gradient iterations, and tridiagonal systems of equations.