New publication on scalable computational kernels for mortar finite elements

26 January 2023

Our new article on "Scalable computational kernels for mortar finite element methods" has been published as open-access paper in Springer's Engineering with Computers.

In this contribution, Dr. Matthias Mayr and Prof. Alexander Popp identify and analyze performance bottlenecks in mortar finite element simulations of computational contact mechanics problems. They address questions of on-node memory demand, communication among parallel processes and load balancing. The evaluation of the mortar terms now incorporates the notion of geometric proximity into to reduce both the on-node memory and parallel communication. In addition, a dynamic load balancing strategy is proposed, which allows to fully exploit all available hardware resources and achieves weak and strong scalability of the mortar evaluation for the first time.

Together with our prior work on "Algebraic multigrid methods for saddle point systems arising from mortar contact formulations", this new contribution paves the way to even faster contact simulations of three-dimensional complex geometries!