Trends in processor technology and their impact on Numerics for PDE's

Processor technology is dramatically advancing and promises enormous improvements in processing data for the next decade. On the other hand, much lower advances in moving data are expected such that the efficiency of many numerical software tools for Partial Differential Equations are restricted by the cost for memory access. We demonstrate how data locality and pipelining can achieve a significant percentage of the available huge computing power, and we explain the influence of processor technology on recent and future numerical simulation tools. Exemplarily, we describe hardware-related concepts for adaptive error control, multigrid/domain decomposition schemes and incompressible flow solvers and discuss their numerical and computational characteristics. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 1606(99-31) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman