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Recent Advances in Parallel Advancing Front Grid Generation

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, and also resources of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. CFD Center, SPACS, M.S. 6A2 College of Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4444, USA

    Rainald Löhner

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Löhner, R. Recent Advances in Parallel Advancing Front Grid Generation. Arch Computat Methods Eng 21, 127–140 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-014-9098-8

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