Due to increasing computational power with a vast performance even in
desktop systems, new possibilities for multiphysics simulations arise,
which intensify the tension placed on mesh generation. On the
one hand, this results in an increased requirement for the robustness of the algorithms
employed, while on the other hand, it also forces the use of
high performance methodologies in order to reduce meshing times.
The quality of the mesh is not only critically important to the
quality of the calculated results: failure to properly control the
meshing process can also jeopardize or even completely prevent simulation.
Since meshing is the first initial step of the simulation flow, all
subsequent results depend on this fundamental step.
A parallel meshing and adaptation approach, combining Delaunay and
advancing front algorithms suitable for finite volume and finite
element discretization schemes for three dimensions, has therefore been
developed.
Parallelization and the robustness of the algorithms are facilitated by
employing a rigorous surface treatment, which not only enforces the
prescribed quality criteria such as the Delaunay property, but also
allows the decoupling of the subsequent parallel volume meshing steps. This
decoupling is of fundamental importance to the volume meshing step.
If the surface remains consistent, there is no need to exchange any
data between the individual threads of the volume meshing process.
This also enables the inherent utilization of many-core CPUs.
Parallelization is implemented by suitably combining multiple
programming paradigms and following modern design guidelines, which is
necessary in order to keep the development on multi-core processors as
simple as possible, while not forsaking any of their computational
power.
The use of multi-core processors can drastically reduce the mesh generation time
as well as the time for execution of subsequent modules,
e.g., a linear solver. The availability of high quality and robust
high performance mesh generation tools is therefore of utmost
importance.
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