A parallel space–time boundary element method for the heat equation

Abstract In this paper we introduce a new parallel solver for the weakly singular space–time boundary integral equation for the heat equation. The space–time boundary mesh is decomposed into a given number of submeshes. Pairs of the submeshes represent dense blocks in the system matrices, which are distributed among computational nodes by an algorithm based on a cyclic decomposition of complete graphs ensuring load balance. In addition, we employ vectorization and threading in shared memory to ensure intra-node efficiency. We present scalability experiments on different CPU architectures to evaluate the performance of the proposed parallelization techniques. All levels of parallelism allow us to tackle large problems and lead to an almost optimal speedup.