ParVoro++: A scalable parallel algorithm for constructing 3D Voronoi tessellations based on kd-tree decomposition

Abstract

The Voronoi tessellation is a fundamental geometric data structure which has numerous applications in various scientific and technological fields. For large particle datasets, computing Voronoi tessellations must be conducted in parallel on a distributed-memory supercomputer in order to satisfy time and memory-size constraints. However, due to load balance and communication, the parallelization of the Voronoi tessellation renders a challenge. In this paper, we present a scalable parallel algorithm for constructing 3D Voronoi tessellations, which evenly distributes the input particles between blocks through kd-tree decomposition. In order to construct the correct global Voronoi topology, we investigate both parametric and non-parametric methods for particle communication among the blocks of a spatial decomposition. The algorithm is implemented exploiting process-level and thread-level parallelization and can be used in a diverse architectural landscape. Using datasets containing up to 330 million particles, we show that our algorithm achieves parallel efficiency up to 57% using 4096 cores on a distributed-memory computer. Moreover, we compare our algorithm with previous attempts to parallelize Voronoi tessellations showing encouraging improvements in terms of computation time.