Scalable Parallel Quadrilateral Mesh Generation Coupled with Mesh Partitioning

In this paper, we present our efforts to parallelize an unstructured quadrilateral mesh generator. Its serial version is based on the divider-and-conquer idea, and mainly includes two stages, i.e. geometry decomposition and mesh generation. Both stages are parallelized separately. A highly efficient fine-grain level parallel scheme is presented to parallelize the stage of geometry decomposition. A SubDomain Graph (SDG), which represents the connections of subdomains, is constructed. The task of parallel mesh generation is then reduced to that of the SDG partitioning. Since the number of elements in subdomains could be pre-computed before meshing, a static load balancing scheme to partition the SDG performs well with the aid of Metis tools. Numerical results show that scalable timing performance could be achieved by using the parallel mesh generator with resulting meshes nicely partitioned among processors, which enables a fast parallel simulation environment by eliminating the traditional I/O-busy process of mesh repartitioning.