Fast Implicit Simulation of Oscillatory Flow in Human Abdominal Bifurcation using a Schur Complement Preconditioner

Kathrin Burckhardt, Dominik Szczerba, Jedediah Brown, Krishnamurthy Muralidhar, and Gabor Szekely, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Euro-Par 2009 - Parallel Processing (refereed proceedings of the 15th International Euro-Par Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, August 25-28, 2009), Volume 5704/200, pp. 747–759, August 22, 2009.

We evaluate a parallel Schur preconditioner for large systems of equations arising from a finite element discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations with streamline diffusion. The performance of the method is assessed on a biomedical problem involving oscillatory flow in a human abdominal bifurcation. Fast access to flow conditions in this location might support physicians in quicker decision making concerning potential interventions. We demonstrate scaling to 8 processors with more than 50% efficiency as well as a significant relaxation of memory requirements. We found an acceleration by up to a factor 9.5 compared to a direct sparse parallel solver at stopping criteria ensuring results similar to a validated reference solution.

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