Thread-parallel mesh improvement using face and edge swapping and vertex insertion

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, we devise a memory model for unstructured mesh data for efficient use of memory on parallel shared memory architectures, with the purpose of lowering the synchronization overhead between threads while avoiding race conditions. Second, we present a new thread-parallel edge and face swapping algorithm for two and three dimensional meshes using OpenMP for shared memory architectures. We show how removing the conflicts from the reconfiguration procedure by applying a vertex locking strategy can result in a near linear speed-up with parallel efficiency of close to one on two threads and 70% with 24 threads on shared-memory processors. Finally, we derive a parallel mesh generation and refinement module for shared memory architectures based on pre-existing serial modules by implementing Chernikov and Chrisochoides' parallel insertion algorithm along with the two above tools. Experiments show a worst case parallel efficiency of 50% for parallel refinement with 24 threads.