Design of an Adaptive, Parallel Finite-Element System

Abstract

A design for a novel prototype finite element system is presented which meets the following four goals: the system constitutes an application-independent finite element solver for a certain class of linear elliptic problems based on a weak mathematical formulation; it incorporates extensive adaptive approaches to minimize the critical decisions demanded of the user; it incorporates adaptive error estimation techniques to provide an optimal solution within a prescribed cost range; and it takes advantage of natural parallelism and modularity to increase the size of the practically solvable problems. The overall system structure is described in terms of parallel processes and is implementable on a wide variety of hardware configurations. The experiments planned to evaluate the various new approaches are also presented. (Author)