Parallel solution of symmetric banded systems on transputers

An efficient parallel solution is presented of a banded system of linear equations on a network of transputers using the Gaussian elimination method. The parallel implementation is based on a row-scattered decomposition of the equation matrices which are assumed to be symmetric and positive definite. In order to achieve an optimal efficiency, the implementation takes advantage of the transputer´s ability to overlap communication work with computation. Various communication strategies and network topologies are examined, and relevant experimental results and performance figures are presented and discussed