Streaming SIMD Extensions applied to boundary element codes

Nowadays processor architectures include Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) originally developed for multimedia applications, not so well explored for scientific computing. This fact has called the attention of the present authors and this paper introduces the application of SSE, also known as multimedia instructions, to boundary element codes. Since SSE instructions are not widespread among boundary element programmers, the authors present this technique applied to a well-known Fortran program for the solution of two-dimensional elastostatic problems. The vectorization guidelines provided here may also be extended to other numerical methods. Numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.