A new Dune grid for scalable dynamic adaptivity based on the p4est software library

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new Dune grid interface leveraging p4est for enhanced scalability and efficiency in parallel adaptive mesh computations, outperforming previous implementations like Dune-ALUGrid.

Contribution

The work extends Dune with a p4est-based grid interface, improving scalability and performance for adaptive mesh computations in parallel environments.

Findings

p4est-based implementation outperforms Dune-ALUGrid in scalability

New balancing strategy improves performance over existing p4est methods

Demonstrated efficiency in 2D and 3D parallel test cases

Abstract

In this work we extend the Dune solver library with another grid interface to the open-source p4est software. While Dune already supports about a dozen different mesh implementations through its mesh interface Dune-Grid, we undertake this new coupling effort in order to inherit p4est's practically unlimited MPI scalability as well as its relatively thin data structures, and its native support for multi-block (forest) mesh topologies in both 2D and 3D. The presented implementation is compared to an existing implementation based on Dune-ALUGrid for a variety of challenging test examples in a parallel environment. The numerical experiments show that the implementation presented here is outperforming Dune-ALUGrid in terms of scalability. In addition, an alternative balancing strategy is presented to ensure 2:1 balancing across element faces showing improved performance compared to the existing p4est balance strategy in the numerical examples considered in this work.