Efficient Parallel Algorithms for 3D Laplacian Smoothing on the GPU

Abstract

In numerical modeling, mesh quality is one of the decisive factors that strongly affects the accuracy of calculations and the convergence of iterations. To improve mesh quality, the Laplacian mesh smoothing method, which repositions nodes to the barycenter of adjacent nodes without changing the mesh topology, has been widely used. However, smoothing a large-scale three dimensional mesh is quite computationally expensive, and few studies have focused on accelerating the Laplacian mesh smoothing method by utilizing the graphics processing unit (GPU). This paper presents a GPU-accelerated parallel algorithm for Laplacian smoothing in three dimensions by considering the influence of different data layouts and iteration forms. To evaluate the efficiency of the GPU implementation, the parallel solution is compared with the original serial solution. Experimental results show that our parallel implementation is up to 46 times faster than the serial version.