BlockSolve95
Sofware for the efficient solution of large, sparse
linear systems on massively parallel computers
BlockSolve95 is a scalable parallel software library primarily
intended for the solution of sparse linear systems that arise from physical
models, especially problems involving multiple degrees of freedom
at each node.
For example, when the finite element method is used
to solve practical problems in structural engineering, each node
typically has two to five degrees of freedom;
BlockSolve95 is designed to take advantage of problems with this type of
local structure.
BlockSolve95 is also reasonably efficient for problems that have only
one degree of freedom associated with each node, such as the
three-dimensional Poisson problem.
BlockSolve95 is general purpose;
we do not require that the matrices
have any particular structure other than being sparse and being
symmetric in structure (but not necessarily in value).
BlockSolve95 Used Within Applications
BlockSolve95 is intended to be used within real
applications codes.
Our experience has shown that most application codes need to solve the
same linear systems with several different right-hand sides and/or solve
linear systems with the same structure, but different matrix values,
multiple times. We have, therefore, designed BlockSolve95
to work well within this context.
Information and Availability
BlockSolve95 runs on a variety of parallel
architectures including the
the IBM SP series, the Cray T3D, the Intel Paragon, the
SGI Power Challenge, and networks of Sun, SGI, DEC alpha, and HP workstations.
This portability is obtained by using the
MPI
message-passing standard.
If MPI has not been installed on your system, we recommend
installing the
MPICH
implementation.
The BlockSolve95
README is available
for this implementation.
The current release can be obtained by
anonymous ftp from info.mcs.anl.gov in the directory
pub/BlockSolve95. Take the file
BlockSolve95.tar.Z.
The
BlockSolve95 Manual can also be obtained from this directory.
The package may also be obtained from
Netlib.
Related Papers
-- Electronic versions of recent publications related to
BlockSolve95.
Previous: Mesh Refinement
Next: Applications
Back: Unstructured Mesh Home Page