CSE Symposium Keynote
TITLE: Parallel Unstructured Mesh Generation Using COTS Software
DATE: Thursday, April 21, 2005
TIME: 9:00 A.M.
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL
ABSTRACT
Existing parallel mesh generation codes are based on the
parallelization of well known sequential mesh generation technology.
Given that it takes a 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deliver technology that is outdated.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. We will discuss
our experience from three parallel meshing methods using public
state-of-the-art sequential software for both 2-D (Triangle from CMU)
and 3-D (SolidMesh from MSU) geometries.
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 and the degree of dependency (or synchronization) between
the subproblems. In this talk we will overview some of our work on
tightly-, partially-coupled, and decoupled methods based on Delaunay
and advancing front techniques. We will also discuss the lessons we
learned.
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 experimental
data that indicate performance improvements of 30% to 50% over plain
MPI codes for generating tetrahedral meshes that vary from 100 million
to 1.2 billion elements. We will conclude the talk with open problems
and future directions.
This work was supported in part by the following NSF grants: Career
Award #CCR-0049086, ITR #ACI-0085969, RI #EIA-9972853, NGS
#EIA-0203974, and ITR-0312980.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Nikos Chrisochoides is Alumni Memorial Distinguished Associate
Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the College of
William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is also currently
Visiting Associate Professor at MIT and Harvard Medical School.
He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University.
Dr. Chrisochoides' work focuses on application-driven research in mesh
generation and parallel runtime systems for scientific computing
simulations. He is working on the development of industrial-strength,
guaranteed-quality, parallel unstructured 3-D mesh generation.