Communication Cost Reduction by Hierarchical Communication Pattern for FE Computation on Cluster-of-Clusters

With the rapid growth of the WAN infrastructures and enhancement of MPI libraries for WAN environment, Grid computing is expected to be a practical methodology for performing very large finite element analyses. In particular, the utilization of Grid enhanced MPI libraries allows one to execute legacy programs on WAN environments, which is very attractive for finite element application users. However, the high communication cost associated with WANs has discouraged its use as a parallel environment for finite element analysis. In this study, we focus on the utilization of Grid environments, in particular on cluster-of-clusters environments for the execution of FEA, and propose a hierarchical communication pattern to reduce the communication cost. By analytically estimating the communication cost, based on the decomposed FE mesh, we assess the effectiveness of the hierarchical communication pattern. We then show the obtained communication cost reduction by numerical experiments performed on cluster-of-clusters on WAN.