Performance of different communication mechanisms for FEM computations on PC-based cluster with SMP nodes

ParallelNuscaS is an object-oriented package for FEM modeling on clusters, developed at the Technical University of Czestochowa. This paper is devoted to the investigation of the influence of communication mechanisms used in the ACCORD cluster on performance of FEM computations. Last year this cluster was built in the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of this University At present, ACCORD contains 18 Pentium III 750 MHz processors, or 9 SMP nodes, connected both by the fast MYRINET network and standard Fast Ethernet, as well as 8 SMP nodes with 16 AMD Athlon MP 1.2 GHZ processors, connected only by the Fast Ethernet.