Multi-Constraint Mesh Partitioning for Contact/Impact Computations

We present a novel approach for decomposing contact/impact computations in which the mesh elements come in contact with each other during the course of the simulation. Effective decomposition of these computations poses a number of challenges as it needs to both balance the computations and minimize the amount of communication that is performed during the finite element and the contact search phase. Our approach achieves the first goal by partitioning the underlying mesh such that it simultaneously balances both the work that is performed during the finite element phase and that performed during contact search phase, while producing subdomains whose boundaries consist of piecewise axes-parallel lines or planes. The second goal is achieved by using a decision tree to decompose the space into rectangular or box-shaped regions that contain contact points from a single partition. Our experimental evaluation on a sequence of 100 meshes, shows that this new approach can reduce the overall communication overhead over existing algorithms.