The Peano software---parallel, automaton-based, dynamically adaptive grid traversals

Weinzierl, Tobias

Abstract

We discuss the design decisions, design alternatives, and rationale behind the third generation of Peano, a framework for dynamically adaptive Cartesian meshes derived from spacetrees. Peano ties the mesh traversal to the mesh storage and supports only one element-wise traversal order resulting from space-filling curves. The user is not free to choose a traversal order herself. The traversal can exploit regular grid subregions and shared memory as well as distributed memory systems with almost no modifications to a serial application code. We formalize the software design by means of two interacting automata—one automaton for the multiscale grid traversal and one for the application-specific algorithmic steps. This yields a callback-based programming paradigm. We further sketch the supported application types and the two data storage schemes realized before we detail high-performance computing aspects and lessons learned. Special emphasis is put on observations regarding the used programming idioms and algorithmic concepts. This transforms our report from a “one way to implement things” code description into a generic discussion and summary of some alternatives, rationale, and design decisions to be made for any tree-based adaptive mesh refinement software.

Citation

Weinzierl, T. (2019). The Peano software---parallel, automaton-based, dynamically adaptive grid traversals. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 45(2), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319797

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Apr 18, 2019
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 5, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 7, 2018
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
• Print ISSN: 0098-3500
• Electronic ISSN: 1557-7295
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 14
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3319797
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1312348
• Related Public URLs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04496