This paper presents the results of a recent collaborative project between EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and Scottish engineering consultants Weidlinger Associates Ltd. The aim of this work was to extend the solver capabilities, and in particular the parallel solver capabilities, of an industrial modelling code, PZFlex. Two key solvers were compared, a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) iterative solver and a state-of-the-art direct solver (MFACT). The PCG solver was parallelised using OpenMP, the new standard for compiler directive based programming of shared memory multiprocessor systems. Our results show that OpenMP delivers parallel efficiencies
of up to 80% for the PCG solver. It also offers good scalability, allowing the simple PCG algorithm to beat the complex MFACT direct solver for typical
simulation runs of PZFlex.