An Adaptable Simulation Framework Based on a Linearized Octree

Abstract

This work presents the basic concepts of the simulation framework Apes, which allows for large scale distributed computations. The main idea of this framework is a commonly used data structure to represent the geometry for various physical solvers and their pre- and post- processing tools. To enable highly parallel computations in a mesh based simulation it is desirable to minimize the necessary local knowledge on each partition of the mesh about the global mesh and remote partitions. In order to achieve this goal of minimal required global information, an octree structure is chosen in the framework. This tree based elemental mesh builds the basis of the presented framework and is available as a Fortran library. Flexible configuration of the simulations is achieved by using the Lua scripting language for configuration files, which is wrapped in a convenience library to easily retrieve configuration data from the scripts in Fortran.