Abstract: The computational efficiency of Finite Element Methods (FEM) on parallel architectures is typically severely limited by sparse iterative solvers. Standard iterative solvers are based on sequential steps of global algebraic operations, which limit their parallel efficiency, and prior art techniques exploit sophisticated programming techniques tailored to specific CPU architectures to improve performance. The inventors present a FEM Multigrid Gaussian Belief Propagation (FMGaBP) technique that eliminates global algebraic operations and sparse data-structures based upon reformulating the variational FEM into a probabilistic inference problem based upon graphical models. Further, the inventors present new formulations for FMGaBP, which further enhance its computation and communication complexities where the parallel features of FMGaBP are leveraged to multicore architectures.