Feast is a hardware-oriented MPI based Finite Element solver toolkit.
With the extension FeastGPU the authors have previously demonstrated that significant
speed-ups in the solution of the scalar Poisson problem can be achieved by
the addition of GPUs as scientific co-processors to a commodity based cluster. In this
paper we put the more general claim to the test: Applications based on Feast, that
ran only on CPUs so far, can be successfully accelerated on a co-processor enhanced
cluster without any code modifications. The chosen solid mechanics code has higher
accuracy requirements and a more diverse CPU/co-processor interaction than the Poisson
example, and is thus better suited to assess the practicability of our acceleration
approach. We present accuracy experiments, a scalability test and acceleration results
for different elastic objects under load. In particular, we demonstrate in detail that
the single precision execution of the co-processor does not affect the final accuracy.
We establish how the local acceleration gains of factors 5.5 to 9.0 translate into 1.6-
to 2.6-fold total speed-up. Subsequent analysis reveals which measures will increase
these factors further.