Properties of a Family of Parallel Finite Element Simulations

	  David R. O'Hallaron and Jonathan Richard Shewchuk
		      School of Computer Science
		      Carnegie Mellon University
			 Pittsburgh, PA 15213

This report characterizes a family of unstructured 3D finite element
simulations that are partitioned for execution on a parallel system.
The simulations, which estimate earthquake-induced ground motion in
the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, range in size from
10,000--1,000,000 nodes and are partitioned for execution on 4--128
PEs.  The purpose of the report is to help researchers better
understand the properties of unstructured 3D finite element meshes and
the sparse matrix-vector product (SMVP) operations that are induced
from them. The report is designed to serve as a comprehensive
reference that researchers can consult for answers to the following
kinds of questions: For a mesh with a particular number of nodes, how
many elements and edges does it have?  What is the distribution of
node degrees in a 3D mesh? What fraction of nodes in a partitioned
mesh are interface nodes? What is the communication volume in a
typical parallel SMVP?  How many messages are there? How big are the
messages? How many nonzeros are contained in the rows of a sparse
matrices induced from 3D meshes?  The partitioned meshes described in
the paper are available electronically.


@techreport	(sfprops96,
author	=	"D. O'Hallaron and J. Shewchuk" ,
title	=	"Properties of a Family of Parallel Finite Element Simulations",
institution=	"School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University" ,
number	=	"CMU-CS-96-141" ,
year	=	"1996" ,
)