CPAFT: A consistent parallel advancing front technique for unstructured triangular/tetrahedral mesh generation

Abstract

Compared with the remarkable progress made in parallel numerical solvers of partial differential equations, the development of algorithms for generating unstructured triangular/tetrahedral meshes has been relatively sluggish. In this paper, we propose a novel, consistent parallel advancing front technique (CPAFT) by combining the advancing front technique, the domain decomposition method based on space-filling curves, the distributed forest-of-overlapping-trees approach, and the consistent parallel maximal independent set algorithm. The newly proposed CPAFT algorithm can mathematically ensure that the generated unstructured triangular/tetrahedral meshes are independent of the number of processors and the implementation of domain decomposition. Several numerical tests are conducted to validate the parallel consistency and outstanding parallel efficiency of the proposed algorithm, which scales effectively up to two thousand processors. This is, as far as we know, the first parallel unstructured triangular/tetrahedral mesh generator with scalability to O(1,000) CPU processors.