Efficient Multilevel Solvers and High Performance Computing Techniques for the Finite Element Simulation of Large-Scale Elasticity Problems

I am sincerely grateful to Professor Stefan Turek, who gave me the opportunity to develop and implement my ideas that finally led to this thesis. He always cared for a nice and friendly working atmosphere at the Institute of Applied Mathematics, he was available for countless dis-cussions and showed me the right directions by asking the decisive questions and pinpointing the essential problems. He was always aware and appreciative of the technical and implemen-tational difficulties that occur when developing a complex software package like FEAST. I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Franz-Theo Suttmeier, Bob Svendsen and Franz-Joseph Barthold who helped me during the initial phase of my PhD studies to deepen my understanding of the continuum mechanical background and of the algorithmic techniques to treat solid mechanical problems. I am very grateful to the members of the FEAST group, Christian Becker, Sven Buijssen, and Dominik Göddeke, who helped me finding the path into and out of the ‘abyss ’ of parallel com-puting, processor architectures, compilers, scripting, and all the other technical details that need to be known to do high performance computing. Especially I would like to thank Dominik Göd-deke for proofreading this thesis and providing constructive suggestions for improvement