Code_aster even more powerful thanks to the linear solver MUMPS

by O. Boiteau; EDF / R&D / SINETICS

The version 13.1 of code_aster had benefited from performance gains thanks to the MUMPS solver, which solves in code_aster the systems of linear equations resulting from the finite element discretization.
The new version of MUMPS integrated in version 13.3 of code_aster published in December does even better.

Time to solution drastically decreased

By making better use of the parallelism of computing cores, it provides in some cases a gain of up to a factor two. In the end, that may be several hours less for the user until the end of the simulation ! The performance test cases perf008d and perf009d have their time decreased by 15% to 50% depending on the case (see Figure 1).
These gains were also observed in industrial studies (30%).

Figure 1: code_aster performance test cases. For each configuration, the best simulation times obtained by optimizing the parameters of MUMPS are displayed.

Promising Outlook

The preliminary tests on the next version of MUMPS, which will be integrated into code_aster in 2017, already promises an even greater performance leap.