Solving partial differential equations on a parallel supercomputer

In many engineering applications, the numerical solution of partial differential equations is required in the design and simulation of new products. Typically the speed and accuracy of such simulations have to be compromised by the user because of the limitations in computer power, resources and memory. As serial computers reach fundamental limits in performance, many engineers are turning to parallel computers to provide them with the computing power necessary for their design work. The iPSC/860 family of concurrent supercomputers gives the design engineer the computer power and memory for fast and accurate simulations. The iPSC/860 contains a number of processors or ´nodes´, each with their own local memory. Calculations are carried out on data in a processor´s local memory and data can be transferred between processors´ local memory by message passing. There is no shared memory or shared resources to limit the scalability of the system.