[petsc-users] Using direct solvers in parallel

[Thomas Witkowski]

I made some comparisons of using umfpack, superlu, superlu_dist and 
mumps to solve systems with sparse matrices arising from finite element 
method. The size of the matrices range from around 50000 to more than 3 
million unknowns. I used 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 nodes to make the benchmark. 
Now, I wonder that in all cases the sequential umfpack was the fastest 
one. So even with 16 cores, superlu_dist and mumps are slower. Can 
anybody of you confirm this observation? Are there any other parallel 
direct solvers around which are more efficient?

Thomas