Toward interoperable mesh, geometry and field components for PDE simulation development

Abstract

Mesh-based PDE simulation codes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and rely on advanced meshing and discretization tools. Unfortunately, it is still difficult to interchange or interoperate tools developed by different communities to experiment with various technologies or to develop new capabilities. To address these difficulties, we have developed component interfaces designed to support the information flow of mesh-based PDE simulations. We describe this information flow and discuss typical roles and services provided by the geometry, mesh, and field components of the simulation. Based on this delineation for the roles of each component, we give a high-level description of the abstract data model and set of interfaces developed by the Department of Energy's Interoperable Tools for Advanced Petascale Simulation (ITAPS) center. These common interfaces are critical to our interoperability goal, and we give examples of several services based upon these interfaces including mesh adaptation and mesh improvement.

Algorithms and data structures for massively parallel generic adaptive finite element codes

“…For example, Burri et al [2005], Tu et al [2005], Chand et al [2008], Sundar et al [2008], and Knepley and Karpeev [2009] discuss related data structures and algorithms. In the current contribution, we base our work on the open source software library p4est, which realizes the oracle functionality in the sense outlined above, and has been shown to scale to hundreds of thousands of processors [Burstedde et al 2011b].…”

Multiphysics simulations: challenges and opportunities.

“…The various ITAPS iMesh implementations (Devine et al, 2009;Chand et al, 2008;Ollivier-Gooch et al, 2010), and others, are based on such a topological abstraction of the mesh. Although it is possible to base the representations used on only the specific mesh entities and adjacencies used in the linkage of specific components, many implementations employ a complete representation in the sense that any of the desired 12 mesh adjacencies can be determined in O(1) time (i.e., are not a function of the number of mesh entities) (Beall and Shephard, 1997;Remacle and Shephard, 2003;Seol and Shephard, 2006).…”

Tools to support mesh adaptation on massively parallel computers

“…One common approach for the distribution of the mesh is to partition it into a set of parts where each part is a set of mesh entities, with the goal of having reasonably continuously connected mesh entities within a single part such that the number of mesh entities on the inter-part boundaries, those mesh entities shared between two or more parts, is minimized in some reasonable fashion. Following somewhat standard practices, and more specifically those being developed by the DOE Sci-DAC for Interoperable Technologies for Advanced Petascale Simulations [11,12], the following are key requirements placed on the definition of mesh parts in a partition:…”