# PATCHWORK: A Multipatch Infrastructure for Multiphysics/Multiscale/Multiframe Fluid Simulations

## TL;DR

PATCHWORK introduces a flexible multipatch infrastructure enabling efficient multiphysics, multiscale, and multiframe fluid simulations by linking diverse grid regions with minimal overhead, adaptable to various fluid dynamics codes.

## Contribution

It presents a novel client-router-server framework for multipatch fluid simulations, allowing different grid geometries, scales, and physics within a unified system.

## Key findings

- Overhead varies with problem and architecture, from negligible to a few times the baseline.
- Can significantly reduce total zone-updates despite potential runtime increase.
- Compatible with Newtonian and relativistic fluid dynamics.

## Abstract

We present a "multipatch" infrastructure for numerical simulation of fluid problems in which sub-regions require different gridscales, different grid geometries, different physical equations, or different reference frames. Its key element is a sophisticated client-router-server framework for efficiently linking processors supporting different regions ("patches") that must exchange boundary data. This infrastructure may be used with a wide variety of fluid dynamics codes; the only requirement is that their primary dependent variables be the same in all patches, e.g., fluid mass density, internal energy density, and velocity. Its structure can accommodate either Newtonian or relativistic dynamics. The overhead imposed by this system is both problem- and computer cluster architecture-dependent. Compared to a conventional simulation using the same number of cells and processors, the increase in runtime can be anywhere from negligible to a factor of a few; however, one of the infrastructure's advantages is that it can lead to a very large reduction in the total number of zone-updates.