CPAFT: A Consistent Parallel Advancing Front Technique for Unstructured Triangular/Tetrahedral Mesh Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CPAFT, a novel parallel mesh generation algorithm that ensures scalability and consistency across multiple processors, significantly advancing unstructured mesh generation for complex simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents CPAFT, the first scalable parallel mesh generator for unstructured triangular and tetrahedral meshes, combining multiple advanced techniques for improved efficiency and consistency.

Findings

Scales effectively up to 2000 processors

Ensures mesh independence from processor count

Demonstrates high parallel efficiency in tests

Abstract

Compared with the remarkable progress made in parallel numerical solvers of partial differential equations,the development of algorithms for generating unstructured triangular/tetrahedral meshes has been relatively sluggish. In this paper, we propose a novel, consistent parallel advancing front technique (CPAFT) by combining the advancing front technique, the domain decomposition method based on space-filling curves, the distributed forest-of-overlapping-trees approach, and the consistent parallel maximal independent set algorithm. The newly proposed CPAFT algorithm can mathematically ensure that the generated unstructured triangular/tetrahedral meshes are independent of the number of processors and the implementation of domain decomposition. Several numerical tests are conducted to validate the parallel consistency and outstanding parallel efficiency of the proposed algorithm, which scales effectively up to two thousand processors. This is, as far as we know, the first parallel unstructured triangular/tetrahedral mesh generator with scalability to O(1,000) CPU processors.