Subject:
paper by Matsui and Okuda
From:
Dave Yuen <davey@krissy.msi.umn.edu>
Date:
Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:09:52 -0500 (CDT)
To:
fox@csit.fsu.edu
CC:
davey@krissy.msi.umn.edu

Review of paper by H. Matsui and H. Okuda

Thermal Convection Analysis in a Rotating Shell by a Parallel
FEM

This is a very good paper on the technical aspects of
carrying out large-scale thermal convection.  It should
be published after some improvements , which i will point out.
These points are raised in the hope that the authors can 
broadcast their work better.

(1.) In the abstgract , more important technical details
such as the number of elements and GFlops attained
for how many processors. These are important information
which should hit the reader's eye at first reading.

(2.) some reference to previous work on finite-elements on
the sphere by Baumgardner and Frederikson , S.I.A.M., 1984 ,
Stuhne and Peltier, J. Computational Physics, 1999.
and issues involving spectral-transform over the sphere
( Lesur and Gubbins, Geophys. J. International, 1999).
Also finite-differences over spherical shell
Fornberg and Merrill, Comparison of finite-difference- and
pseudospectral   methods  for  convective  flow  over  a  sphere,
Geophys. Res. Lett., 24, 3245-3248, 1997.
The authors should discuss the relative merits of
finite-element methods in treating the singular polar
problem. This may be a distinct advantage of finite-elements
in using integration by parts to get rid of the singularity.
They should look definitely into the icosehedral method
by Stuhne and Peltier ( 1996, 1999, both in J. Computational
Physics ) in this connection.

(3) some more discussions about future prospects of this method
in relationship to the growth of computational power in the near
future ( next 2 years ).


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signed Dave Yuen