Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

hp3D — The Parallel MPI/OpenMP Implementation of the 3D hp-Adaptive FE Code

Stefan Henneking and Leszek Demkowicz, Oden Institute, UT Austin

Abstract

**This seminar by Leszek and Stefan is the first seminar of the semester that will be presented LIVE in POB 6.304.  It will also be presented via Zoom.**

We present a scalable parallel version of hp3D—a finite element(FE) software for analysis and discretization of complex three-dimensional multiphysics applications. The developed software supports hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelism for large-scale computation on modern manycore architectures. The focus of the effort lies in the development and optimization of the parallel software infrastructure underlying all distributed computation. We discuss the challenges of designing efficient data structures for isotropic and anisotropic hp-adaptive meshes with tetrahedral, hexahedral, prismatic, and pyramidal elements supporting discretization of the exact sequence energy spaces.

While the code supports standard Galerkin methods, special emphasis is given to systems arising from discretization with the discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin (DPG) method. The method guarantees discrete stability by employing locally optimal test functions, and it has a built-in error indicator which we exploit to guide mesh adaptivity. In addition to interfacing with third party packages for various tasks, we have developed our own tools including a parallel nested dissection solver suitable for scalable FE computation of waveguide geometries.

We present weak-scaling results with up to 24 576 CPU cores and numerical simulations with more than one billion degrees of freedom.

Biography

Leszek F. Demkowicz is Assistant Director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) and holder of W. A."Tex'' Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Computational Engineering and Sciences II. He is a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and also a Professor in the Department of Mathematics, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow of both U.S. and International Associations for Computational Mechanics, honorary member of Polish Association for Computational Mecahnics, and a member of several other professional organizations. He has graduated 23 Ph.D. and numerous M.S. students. His work and scientific interests span across numerical analysis, adaptive finite element methods, and wave propagation problems, including acoustics, elastodynamics and electromagnetics. Among other applications, Dr. Demkowicz and his group have developed original numerical methods for structural vibrations, analysis of acoustics of the human ear, dynamic modeling of gears, analysis of optical waveguides, calculation of Radar Crossections, borehole electromagnetics, and acoustics.  

Stefan Henneking is a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oden Institute. Stefan is a Spring 2021 PhD graduate of the Oden Institute’s CSEM program. He received a BS in Computational Engineering from the University of Erlangen, Germany, in 2014, and a MS in CSE from Georgia Tech in 2016. His research interests lie in high-performance computing and the analysis and implementation of numerical methods for solving linear and nonlinear systems of PDEs. His current work focuses on applications in electromagnetic wave propagation, including nonlinear fiber optics.