Solving linear equation systems using parallel processing

Abstract

This paper shows the abilities of the parallel processing in the solution of linear equation systems. The solution of linear equation systems is one of the most time consuming task in the analysis of the structural problem in civil engineering. This is more evident in finite element analysis because the solving phase spends almost the whole time of the analysis. To solve this time consuming it is proposed the use of the parallel processing in the solution of the equation systems.

The Gaussian elimination method, the Cholesky factorization method and the Conjugate Gradient iterative method were chosen. For these methods it was analysed the sequential time, the parallel time, the speedup and the efficiency of the parallel algorithm relatively at the sequential algorithm. Parallel times are gotten for 2 to 16 processors because this work was developed in a parallel computer with 16 transputers IMS T800- 20 every one with 2 MBytes of RAM.