Effective out-of-core parallel Delaunay mesh refinement using off-the-shelf software

We present two cost-effective and high-performance out-of-core parallel mesh generation algorithms and their implementation on cluster of workstations (CoWs). The total wall-clock time including wait-in-queue delays for the out-of-core methods on a small cluster (16 processors) is three times shorter than the total wall-clock time for the in-core generation of the same size mesh (about a billion elements) using 121 processors. Our best out-of-core method, for mesh sizes that fit completely in the core of the CoWs, is about 5% slower than its in-core parallel counterpart method. This is a modest performance penalty for savings of many hours in response time. Both the in-core and out-of-core methods use the best publicly available off-the-shelf sequential in-core Delaunay mesh generator