Parallel solution of systems of linear equations generated by COMSOL 3.2 using the Sun Performance Library

This note investigates the use of the Sun Performance Library for parallel solution of a system of linear equations generated by COMSOL 3.2. In many engineering disciplines this is a computational bottleneck for large problems which are often met in research practice. Most researches are primarily concerned with developing a proper (COMSOL) model rather than developing efficient linear algebra solvers which motivates this investigation of the efficiency of the coupling COMSOL + SPL. The technicalities of making such a coupling is described in detail along with a measure of the speedup for a testproblem run in 2D and 3D. Moreover this note quantifies the performance of COMSOL running on a Sparc ULTRA III processor. The study shows that for small problems such as debugging tasks, teaching exercises etc. the Sun computer is not competitive compared with a standard PC.