SSP 1994 project summary:
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Development and Investigation of a Parallel Multigrid Algorithm

The numerical simulation of physical systems usually reduces to solving large sets of linear equations derived from the numerical model. The use of Multigrid (MG) methods for the iterative solution of these linear equations is a relatively recent innovation. The Met. Office is researching the application of MG methods, to determine which ones are most appropriate for atmospheric modelling.

The implementation of MG on distributed memory parallel systems raises many other issues, such as the optimum strategy for the distribution of the multiple grids over processors. During the 1993 SSP, a simple 2D model of the atmosphere (with only 1 vertical level) with a MG "solver" was parallelised and successfully tested on up to 4 processors. The scalability of this implementation is limited by constraints imposed to simplify parallelisation.

The objectives of this project is to extend the parallel development of the 2D model for greater scalability, and to fully investigate parallel performance and efficiency. The latter may make use of code instrumentation utilities to monitor message-passing activity (VISPAD).


Mark White worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of Mark's final report is available here (209917 bytes) .

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