Recent Advances in Parallel Advancing Front Grid Generation

Abstract

The quest for scalable, parallel advancing front grid generation techniques now spans more than two decades. A recent innovation has been the use of a so-called domain-defining grid, which has led to a dramatic increase in robustness and speed. The domain-defining grid (DDG) has the same fine surface triangulation as the final mesh desired, but a much coarser interior mesh. The DDG renders the domain to be gridded uniquely defined and allows for a well balanced work distribution among the processors during all stages of grid generation and improvement. In this way, most of the shortcomings of previous techniques are overcome. Timings show that the approach is scalable and able to produce large grids of high quality in a modest amount of clocktime. These recent advances in parallel grid generation have enabled a completely scalable simulation pipeline (grid generation, solvers, post-processing), opening the way for truly large-scale computations using unstructured, body-fitted grids.

Full Document