A Parallel Variational Mesh Quality Improvement Method for Tetrahedral Meshes

There are numerous large-scale applications requiring mesh adaptivity, e.g., computational fluid dynamics and weather prediction. Parallel processing is needed for simulations involving large-scale adaptive meshes. In this paper, we propose a parallel variational mesh quality improvement algorithm for use with distributed memory machines. Our method parallelizes the serial variational mesh quality improvement method by Huang and Kamenski. Their approach is based on the use of the Moving Mesh PDE method to adapt the mesh based on the minimization of an energy functional for mesh equidistribution and alignment. This leads to a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to be solved which determine where to move the interior mesh nodes. An efficient solution is obtained by solving the ODEs on subregions of the mesh with overlapped communication and computation. Strong and weak scaling experiments on up to 128 cores for meshes with up to 160M elements demonstrate excellent results.