A new parallel sparse direct solver: numerical experiments in large-scale structural mechanics parallel computing

 The main purpose of this work is to present a new parallel direct solver: Dissection solver. It is based on LU
factorization of the sparse matrix of the linear system and allows to
detect automatically and handle properly the zero-energy modes, which
are important when dealing with DDM. A performance evaluation and
comparisons with other direct solvers (MUMPS, DSCPACK) are also given
for both sequential and parallel computations. Results of numerical
experiments with a two-level parallelization of large-scale structural
analysis problems are also presented: FETI is used for the global
problem parallelization and Dissection for the local
multithreading. In this framework, the largest problem we have solved is
of an elastic solid composed of 400 subdomains running on 400
computation nodes (3200 cores) and containing about 165 millions dof.
The computation of one single iteration consumes less than 20 min of CPU
time. Several comparisons to MUMPS are given for the numerical
computation of large-scale linear systems on a massively parallel
cluster: performances and weaknesses of this new solver are highlighted

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nme.3179/abstract