A serious computational bottle-neck in finite element analysis today is the solution of the underlying system of equations. To alleviate this problem, researchers have proposed the use of graphics programmable units (GPU) for fast iterative solution of such equations. Indeed, researchers have shown that a GPU-implementation of a double-precision sparse-matrix-vector multiplication (that underlies all iterative methods) is approximately an order of magnitude faster than that of an optimized CPU implementation. Unfortunately, fast matrix-vector multiplication alone is insufficient… a good preconditioner is necessary for rapid convergence. Furthermore, most modern preconditioners, such as incomplete Cholesky, are expensive to compute, and cannot be easily ported to the GPU. In this paper, we propose a special class of preconditioners for the analysis of thin structures, such as beams and plates. The proposed preconditioners are developed by combining the multi-grid method, with recently developed dual-representation method for thin structures. It is shown, that these preconditioners are computationally inexpensive, perform better than standard pre-conditioners, and can be easily ported to the GPU.
FPGA architecture and implementation of sparse matrix–vector multiplication for the finite element method
