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Parallel decoupled terminal-edge bisection method for 3D mesh generation

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Abstract

We present a practical and stable algorithm for the parallel refinement of tetrahedral meshes. The algorithm is based on the refinement of terminal-edges and associated terminal stars. A terminal-edge is a special edge in the mesh which is the longest edge of every element that shares such an edge, while the elements that share a terminal-edge form a terminal star. We prove that the algorithm is inherently decoupled and thus scalable. Our experimental data show that we have a stable implementation able to deal with hundreds of millions of tetrahedra and whose speed is in between one and two order of magnitude higher from the method and implementation we presented (Rivara et al., Proceedings 13th international meshing roundtable, 2004).

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Acknowledgments

The C++ code RemGO3D was developed at the University of Chile under grant Fondecyt 1040713. The parallel results were obtained by using computational facilities at the College of William and Mary which were enabled by grants from Sun Microsystems, the National Science Foundation, and Virginia’s Commonwealth Technology Research Fund. We thank the referees whose comments helped to improve the paper and Daniel Pizarro who wrote the previous Java implementation.

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Correspondence to Maria-Cecilia Rivara.

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Maria-Cecilia Rivara and Carlo Calderon's work was partially supported by Fondecyt 1040713.

Andriy Fedorov’s work is supported in part by ITR #ACI-0085969, and NGS #ANI-0203974.

Nikos Chrisochoides’s work is supported in part by NSF Career Award #CCR-0049086, ITR #ACI-0085969, NGS #ANI-0203974, and ITR #CNS-0312980.

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Rivara, MC., Calderon, C., Fedorov, A. et al. Parallel decoupled terminal-edge bisection method for 3D mesh generation. Engineering with Computers 22, 111–119 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-006-0013-2

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