Abstract: For 3D elasticity problems,the parallel computations based on the fast multipole and the conventional boundary element method(BEM)on PC cluster are compared.The parallel computation of conventional BEM applies Gauss elimination by calling the ScaLAPACK library,while the fast multipole version is implemented by programming with ANSI C++ and MPI(Message Passing Interface).Both approaches are tested on the same PC cluster.Numerical examples show that the scale of solvable problems can be increased significantly for the fast multipole BEM,and that the computational speed is much faster than conventional BEM.Besides,the parallel speedup of the fast multipole BEM is also higher than that of the conventional one.