Finite element calculations at the parallel computers Intel/Paragon, IBM SP-2, and a cluster of DEC-ALPHA workstations

In many natural and engineering science applications, systems of partial differential equations have to be solved. The finite element method represents an effective tool to solve these systems, but a disadvantage arises due to the very high computation times regarding conventional serial computers. Therefore, the finite element code SMART has been parallelized and can now be executed on different parallel machines on which a message passing system as Intel/NX, MPI or PARMACS is available. In this paper a short overview of the parallelization strategy is given but the main focus lies on the benchmark of a given problem on different computer architectures, which shows the pros and cons of these machines as well as of parallel computing.