Static load balancing applied to Schur complement method
A finite element method often leads to large sparse symmetric and positive definite systems of linear equations. We consider parallel solvers based on the Schur complement method on homogeneous parallel machines with distributed memory. A finite element mesh is partitioned by graph partitioning. Such partitioning results in submeshes with similar numbers of elements and, consequently, submatrices of similar sizes. The submatrices are partially factorised. The time spent on the partial factorisation can be different, i.e., disbalanced, because methods exploiting the sparsity of submatrices are used. This paper proposes a Quality Balancing heuristic that modifies classic mesh partitioning so that the partial factorisation times are balanced, which saves overall computation time, especially for time dependent mechanical and nonstationary transport problems.
static load balancing schur complement method finite element methods parallel solvers mesh partitioning domain decomposition multilevel graph partitioning time-dependent problems