DIME: portable software for irregular meshes for parallel or sequential computer

A programming environment for instructured triangular meshes has been written. The resulting software, DIME (distributed irregular mesh environment), is responsible for the mesh structure, and a separate application code runs a particular type of simulation on the mesh. DIME keeps track of the mesh structure, allowing mesh creation, reading and writing meshes to disk, and graphics. Adaptive refinement and certain topological changes to the mesh are included. It hides the parallelism from the application code and splits the mesh among the processors in an efficient way. The application code is responsible for attaching data to the elements and nodes of the mesh and for manipulating and computing with these data and the data from its mesh neighborhood. DIME is designed to be portable between different MIMD (multiple-instruction, multiple-data) parallel machines and also to run on any UNIX machine, treating this as a parallel machine with just one processor.<>