Is parallelism useful in order to improve response time of a finite element method?

Is parallel processing useful in order to improve response time of a finite element method ? The answer in obviously positive for the processes of integration and assembly of finite element matrix and for equipotential line plotting. We shall show that it may also be of interest for the solution of the linear system. The paper describes a method using several parallel processes. We show that when the bandwidth of the matrix is large enough, two parallel processes are performant and the gain is upper than 30 %. For smaller bandwidth matrices, it is possible and performant to use more than 2 parallel processes, and we give, for each problem, the optimal number of processes.