<h1>Results</h1>

When you run the program, on a single processor or with your local MPI
installation on a few, you should get output like this:
@code
Cycle 0:
   Number of active cells:       1024
   Number of degrees of freedom: 4225
   Solved in 10 iterations.


+---------------------------------------------+------------+------------+
| Total wallclock time elapsed since start    |     0.176s |            |
|                                             |            |            |
| Section                         | no. calls |  wall time | % of total |
+---------------------------------+-----------+------------+------------+
| assembly                        |         1 |    0.0209s |        12% |
| output                          |         1 |    0.0189s |        11% |
| setup                           |         1 |    0.0299s |        17% |
| solve                           |         1 |    0.0419s |        24% |
+---------------------------------+-----------+------------+------------+


Cycle 1:
   Number of active cells:       1954
   Number of degrees of freedom: 8399
   Solved in 10 iterations.


+---------------------------------------------+------------+------------+
| Total wallclock time elapsed since start    |     0.327s |            |
|                                             |            |            |
| Section                         | no. calls |  wall time | % of total |
+---------------------------------+-----------+------------+------------+
| assembly                        |         1 |    0.0368s |        11% |
| output                          |         1 |    0.0208s |       6.4% |
| refine                          |         1 |     0.157s |        48% |
| setup                           |         1 |    0.0452s |        14% |
| solve                           |         1 |    0.0668s |        20% |
+---------------------------------+-----------+------------+------------+


Cycle 2:
   Number of active cells:       3664
   Number of degrees of freedom: 16183
   Solved in 11 iterations.

...
@endcode

The exact numbers differ, depending on how many processors we use;
this is due to the fact that the preconditioner depends on the
partitioning of the problem, the solution then differs in the last few
digits, and consequently the mesh refinement differs slightly.
The primary thing to notice here, though, is that the number of
iterations does not increase with the size of the problem. This
guarantees that we can efficiently solve even the largest problems.

When run on a sufficiently large number of machines (say a few
thousand), this program can relatively easily solve problems with well
over one billion unknowns in less than a minute. On the other hand,
such big problems can no longer be visualized, so we also ran the
program on only 16 processors. Here are a mesh, along with its
partitioning onto the 16 processors, and the corresponding solution:

<TABLE WIDTH="100%">
<tr>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.mesh.png" alt="">
</td>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.solution.png" alt="">
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The mesh on the left has a mere 7,069 cells. This is of course a
problem we would easily have been able to solve already on a single
processor using step-6, but the point of the program was to show how
to write a program that scales to many more machines. For example,
here are two graphs that show how the run time of a large number of parts
of the program scales on problems with around 52 and 375 million degrees of
freedom if we take more and more processors (these and the next couple of
graphs are taken from an earlier version of the
@ref distributed_paper "Distributed Computing paper"; updated graphs showing
data of runs on even larger numbers of processors, and a lot
more interpretation can be found in the final version of the paper):

<TABLE WIDTH="100%">
<tr>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.strong2.png" alt="">
</td>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.strong.png" alt="">
</td>
</tr>
</table>

As can clearly be seen, the program scales nicely to very large
numbers of processors. The curves, in particular the linear solver, become a
bit wobble at the right end of the graphs since each processor has too little
to do to offset the cost of communication (the part of the whole problem each
processor has to solve in the above two examples is only 13,000 and 90,000
degrees of freedom when 4,096 processors are used).

While the strong scaling graphs above show that we can solve a problem of
fixed size faster and faster if we take more and more processors, the more
interesting question may be how big problems can become so that they can still
be solved within a reasonable time on a machine of a particular size. We show
this in the following two graphs for 256 and 4096 processors:

<TABLE WIDTH="100%">
<tr>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.256.png" alt="">
</td>
<td>
  <img src="http://www.dealii.org/images/steps/developer/step-40.4096.png" alt="">
</td>
</tr>
</table>

What these graphs show is that all parts of the program scale linearly with
the number of degrees of freedom. This time, lines are wobbly at the left as
the size of local problems is too small. For more discussions of these results
we refer to the @ref distributed_paper "Distributed Computing paper".

So how large are the largest problems one can solve? At the time of writing
this problem, the
limiting factor is that the program uses the BoomerAMG algebraic
multigrid method from the <a
href="http://acts.nersc.gov/hypre/" target="_top">Hypre package</a> as
a preconditioner, which unfortunately uses signed 32-bit integers to
index the elements of a %distributed matrix. This limits the size of
problems to $2^{31}-1=2,147,483,647$ degrees of freedom. From the graphs
above it is obvious that the scalability would extend beyond this
number, and one could expect that given more than the 4,096 machines
shown above would also further reduce the compute time. That said, one
can certainly expect that this limit will eventually be lifted by the
hypre developers.



<a name="extensions"></a>
<h3>Possibilities for extensions</h3>

In a sense, this program is the ultimate solver for the Laplace
equation: it can essentially solve the equation to whatever accuracy
you want, if only you have enough processors available. Since the
Laplace equation by itself is not terribly interesting at this level
of accuracy, the more interesting possibilities for extension
therefore concern not so much this program but what comes beyond
it. For example, several of the other programs in this tutorial have
significant run times, especially in 3d. It would therefore be
interesting to use the techniques explained here to extend other
programs to support parallel distributed computations. We have done
this for step-31 in the step-32 tutorial program, but the same would
apply to, for example, step-23 and step-25 for hyperbolic time
dependent problems, step-33 for gas dynamics, or step-35 for the
Navier-Stokes equations.

Maybe equally interesting is the problem of postprocessing. As
mentioned above, we only show pictures of the solution and the mesh
for 16 processors because 4,096 processors solving 1 billion unknowns
would produce graphical output on the order of several 10
gigabyte. Currently, no program is able to visualize this amount of
data in any reasonable way unless it also runs on at least several
hundred processors. There are, however, approaches where visualization
programs directly communicate with solvers on each processor with each
visualization process rendering the part of the scene computed by the
solver on this processor. Implementing such an interface would allow
to quickly visualize things that are otherwise not amenable to
graphical display.
