An extension to VORO++ for multithreaded computation of Voronoi cells

TL;DR

This paper extends the VORO++ library to enable multithreaded Voronoi cell computation using OpenMP, significantly improving performance and scalability for large particle systems.

Contribution

The authors develop a multithreaded extension to VORO++ that achieves high parallel efficiency, facilitating faster Voronoi tessellation analysis on modern hardware.

Findings

Achieved over 95% parallel efficiency in multithreaded Voronoi computations.

Successfully analyzed up to 102.4 million particles with improved speed.

Extension easily integrates with existing software like VoroTop.

Abstract

VORO++ is a software library written in C++ for computing the Voronoi tessellation, a technique in computational geometry that is widely used for analyzing systems of particles. VORO++ was released in 2009 and is based on computing the Voronoi cell for each particle individually. Here, we take advantage of modern computer hardware, and extend the original serial version to allow for multithreaded computation of Voronoi cells via the OpenMP application programming interface. We test the performance of the code, and demonstrate that we can achieve parallel efficiencies greater than 95% in many cases. The multithreaded extension follows standard OpenMP programming paradigms, allowing it to be incorporated into other programs. We provide an example of this using the VoroTop software library, performing a multithreaded Voronoi cell topology analysis of up to 102.4 million particles.