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Parallel Unstructured Mesh Generation Using COTS: One Step Closer to Real-time Mesh Generation

 

Nikos Chrisochoides

 

Published in Invited talk in Computational Visualization Center (CVC), Institute of Computational Engineering an, February, 2007

 

Abstract

 

Existing parallel mesh generation codes based on the parallelization of well known sequential mesh generation technology. Given that it takes very long time to develop the software infrastructure for sequential industrial strength mesh generation libraries, it is clear that traditional parallelization approaches deliver technology that is outdated. This problem becomes more serious if one considers that improvements of sequential codes in terms of quality, speed, and functionality are open ended. In this talk we present a COTS (commercial of-the-shelf) based approach to parallel mesh generation for addressing this serious problem. Parallel mesh generation procedures decompose the original mesh generation problem into N smaller subproblems that can be meshed in parallel using P (<< N) nodes. The subproblems can be formulated to be either tightly or partially coupled or even decoupled to each other. The coupling of the subproblems determines the intensity of the communication/sharing/contention and the degree of dependency (or synchronization) between the subproblems. In this talk we will overview some of our work on tightly-, partially-coupled, decoupled, and hybrid guaranteed quality Delaunay meshing methods we developed at the College of William and Mary. Our parallel mesh generation codes are implemented on top of a runtime system (PREMA) that provides support for one-sided communication, remote service request, global address space in the context of data mobility, transparent routing of messages, and automatic dynamic load balancing. We will briefly describe PREMA and present some experimental data that indicate performance improvements from over 30% to 50% over plane MPI codes for generating tetrahedral meshes that vary from 100 millions to 1.2 billion elements. We will conclude the talk with open problems and future directions in real-time mesh generation for bioengineering applications.