Geometry-aided rectilinear partitioning of unstructured meshes

Abstract

This paper introduces an infrastructure for parallel mesh computations running on distributed-memory computers. The infrastructure consists of the mesh partitioning algorithm GARP and the domain-specific communication library GRAPHlib. Unlike existing algorithms, GARP exploits geometrical properties of the mesh shape in order to produce shape-adequate rectilinear partitions. The structure of such partitions is exploited by GRAPHlib using an optimized message ordering strategy. We describe the concepts behind GARP and GRAPHlib and show that for meshes with particular shapes our infrastructure provides better utilization of the parallel computer than solutions using existing partitioning algorithms and communication libraries.