Section: New Software and Platforms

PaMPA

Participants : Cédric Lachat, François Pellegrini [Corresponding member] , Cécile Dobrzynski.

PaMPA (“Parallel Mesh Partitioning and Adaptation”) is a middleware library dedicated to the management of distributed meshes. Its purpose is to relieve solver writers from the tedious and error prone task of writing again and again service routines for mesh handling, data communication and exchange, remeshing, and data redistribution. It is based on a distributed data structure that represents meshes as a set of entities (elements, faces, edges, nodes, etc.), linked by relations (that is, computation dependencies).

PaMPA interfaces with Scotch for mesh redistribution, and with MMG3D for parallel remeshing of tetrahedral elements. Other sequential remeshers can be plugged-in, in order to handle other types of elements.

Version 1.0 of PaMPA allows users to declare distributed meshes, to declare values attached to the entities of the meshes (e.g. temperature attached to elements, pressures to the faces, etc.), to exchange values between overlapping entities located at the boundaries of subdomains assigned to different processors, to iterate over the relations of entities (e.g. iterate over the faces of elements), to remesh in parallel the areas of a mesh that need to be emeshed, and to redistribute evenly the remeshed mesh across the processors of the parallel architecture.

PaMPA is already used as the data structure manager for two solvers being developed at Inria: Plato (team PUMAS) and AeroSol (teams BACCHUS and CAGIRE).

Following expressions of interest from industrial partners, a formal industrialization process of PaMPA has been started, under the auspices of the Direction du Transfert Technologique (DTI) at Inria. In this context, much work was directed towards improving the robustness of the code, by including it into a continuous integration framework based on Jenkins .