The virtual simulation community knows the boundary element method (BEM) thanks to the success gained in the acoustics field. It is actually considered as the winning numerical approach to efficiently solve the Helmoltz equation, especially when unbounded domains are considered.
In this paper we present an implementation of the BEM collocation approach for the solution of exterior acoustic problems in Scilab. The idea is to show that it is possible to solve non-trivial problems in a reasonable amount of time: to improve the efficiency of the code we decided to implement in C the most time consuming tasks, compile and link the outcome libraries directly in Scilab. Moreover, we parallelized our code including some openMP directives to get a substantial reduction of the computational time when using a multicore shared memory machine.
The most remarkable aspect of this activity is that we managed to solve an industrial-like problem in a reasonable time accessing high performance computing (HPC) resources without any license fee.
The full 12 pages paper can be downloaded here.
