Efficient parallel optimization of volume meshes on heterogeneous computing systems

Abstract

We describe a parallel algorithmic framework for optimizing the shape of elements in a simplicial volume mesh. Using fine-grained parallelism and asymmetric multiprocessing on multi-core CPU and modern graphics processing unit hardware simultaneously, we achieve speedups of more than tenfold over current state-of-the-art serial methods. In addition, improved mesh quality is obtained by optimizing both the surface and the interior vertex positions in a single pass, using feature preservation to maintain fidelity to the original mesh geometry. The framework is flexible in terms of the core numerical optimization method employed, and we provide performance results for both gradient-based and derivative-free optimization methods.