FEAST – Realisation of hardware-oriented numerics for HPC simulations with finite elements

FEAST (Finite Element Analysis & Solutions Tools) is a Finite Element based solver toolkit for the simu-lation of PDE problems on parallel HPC systems which implements the concept of ‘hardware-oriented nu-merics’, a holistic approach aiming at optimal performance for modern numerics. In this paper, we describe this concept and the modular design which enables applications built on top of FEAST to execute effi-ciently, without any code modifications, on commodity based clusters, the NEC SX 8 and GPU-accelerated clusters. We demonstrate good performance and weak and strong scalability for the prototypical Poisson problem and more challenging applications from solid mechanics and fluid dynamics.