Parallel implementation of the p‐version of the finite element method for elliptic equations on a shared‐memory architecture

An implementation of the p‐version of the finite element method for solving two‐dimensional linear elliptic problems on a shared‐memory parallel computer is analyzed. The idea is to partition the problem among the available processors and perform computations corresponding to different elements in parallel. The parallelization is based on a domain decomposition technique using the Lagrange multipliers. The numerical experiments carried out on the Sequent system indicate very high performance of the mixed finite element algorithm in terms of attained speedups. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.