  Finite element method (FEM) is one of the most important numerical methods in
modern engineering design and analysis. Since traditional serial FEM is
difficult to solve large FE problems efficiently and accurately,
high-performance parallel FEM has become one of the essential way to solve
practical engineering problems. Based on MiniFE program, which is released by
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(NERSC), this work analyzes
concrete steps, key computing pattern and parallel mechanism of parallel FEM.
According to experimental results, this work analyzes the proportion of
calculation amount of each module and concludes the main performance bottleneck
of the program. Based on that, we optimize the MiniFE program on a server
platform. The optimization focuses on the bottleneck of the program - SpMV
kernel, and uses an efficient storage format named BCRS. Moreover, an improving
plan of hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming is provided. Experimental results show
that the optimized program performs better in both SpMV kernel and
synchronization. It can increase the performance of the program, on average, by
8.31%. Keywords : finite element, parallel, MiniFE, SpMV, performance
optimization
