Mark Adams

I received my Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, from U.C. Berkeley in 1998 and am a former student and postdoc with Jim Demmel  in the Computer Science Division, at U.C. Berkeley.  I work in the Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics Department at Columbia University and work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.


Research Interests:
My research interests are in high performance finite element simulation systems - in particular, parallel multigrid equation solvers for large unstructured finite element problems in solid mechanics.

I have developed  Athena, a parallel finite element implementation, built on FEAP  a serial finite element implementation.  Athena uses my solver Prometheus, an unstructured multigrid equation solver for large scale (106-109 degrees of freedom) finite element problems, which was the focus of my dissertation. I use the PETSc - numerical libraries, from Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), to provide high performance, cross platform, support for iterative solvers for discretized partial differential equations and ParMetis, from the University of Minnesota for parallel mesh partitioning.

I have assembled some of my finite element test problems (meshes, stiffness matrices, RHS vectors and solution vectors), that I use to evaluate the effectiveness of my solvers, are available for other researchers to use to test their solvers.


Selected Papers:
  • Algebraic multigrid techniques for strongly indefinite linear systems from direct frequency response analysis in solid mechanics. (draft) Computional Mechanics, 2004.(bibtex entry)
  • Ultrascalable implicit finite element analyses in solid mechanics with over a half a billion degrees of freedom Gordon Bell Award paper, Supercomputing 2004 (bibtex entry)
  • Algebraic multigrid methods for constrained linear systems with applications to contact problems in solid mechanics Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications (bibtex entry)
  • Applications of Algebraic Multigrid to Large-Scale Finite Element Analysis of Whole Bone Micro-Mechanics on the IBM SP (pdf) Proceedings Supercomputing '03 (bibtex entry)
  • Parallel Multigrid Smoothing: Polynomial versus Gauss-Seidel, J. Comp. Phys.  (bibtex entry)
  • Evaluation of Three Unstructured Multigrid Methods on 3D Finite Element Problems in Solid Mechanics (long version). (bibtex entry).
  • A Distributed Memory Unstructured Gauss-Seidel Algorithm for Multigrid Smoothers. Proceedings Supercomputing '01 (bibtex entry)
  • Parallel Multigrid Solvers for 3D Unstructured Finite Element Problems in Large Deformation Elasticity and Plasticity,   International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering (bibtex entry).
  • Parallel Multigrid Solver Algorithms and Implementations for 3D Unstructured Finite Element Problems, Proceedings Supercomputing '99, (bibtex entry).
  • Multigrid equation solvers for large scale nonlinear finite element simulations, Ph.D. dissertation.  (bibtex entry)
  • A Parallel Maximal Independent Set Algorithm,   5th Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods,  (bibtex entry)

    • Awards:
  • Gordon Bell Award, Special catagory, SuperComputing 2004, November 6-12, Pittsburgh PA.
  • Carl Benz Award for the best industrial application in Mannheim SuParCup '99 at Mannheim Supercomputer '99 Conference, June 10-12, 1999.
  • First prize in student paper competition at the 5th Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods.  March 30 - April 3,1998.

    • Presentations:
    Resources: