Section: New Results

Parallel meshing of surfaces defined by collections of connected regions

Participant : Patrick Laug [correspondant] .

In CAD (computer aided design) environments, a surface is commonly modeled as a collection of connected regions represented by parametric mappings. For meshing such a composite surface, a parallelized indirect approach with dynamic load balancing can be used on a shared memory system. However, this methodology can be inefficient in practice because most existing CAD systems use memory caches that are only appropriate to a sequential process. As part of the sabbatical year of P. Laug at Polytechnique Montréal in 2014/2015, two solutions have been proposed, referred to as the Pirate approach and the Discrete approach. In the first approach, the Pirate library can be efficiently called in parallel since no caching is used for the storage or evaluation of geometric primitives. In the second approach, the CAD environment is replaced by internal procedures interpolating a discrete geometric support. In 2016, the dynamic load balancing has been analyzed and improved. Significant modifications to the Pirate library have been made, and new numerical tests on three different computers (4, 8 and 64 cores) have been carried out, now showing an almost linear scaling of the method in all cases [10].