The Peano software – parallel, automaton-based, dynamically adaptive grid traversals. (English) Zbl 07119133

Weinzierl, Tobias

ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 45, No. 2, Article No. 14, 41 p. (2019).

Summary: We discuss the design decisions, design alternatives, and rationale behind the third generation of Peano, a framework for dynamically adaptive Cartesian meshes derived from spacetrees. Peano ties the mesh traversal to the mesh storage and supports only one element-wise traversal order resulting from space-filling curves. The user is not free to choose a traversal order herself. The traversal can exploit regular grid subregions and shared memory as well as distributed memory systems with almost no modifications to a serial application code. We formalize the software design by means of two interacting automata – one automaton for the multiscale grid traversal and one for the application-specific algorithmic steps. This yields a callback-based programming paradigm. We further sketch the supported application types and the two data storage schemes realized before we detail high-performance computing aspects and lessons learned. Special emphasis is put on observations regarding the used programming idioms and algorithmic concepts. This transforms our report from a “one way to implement things” code description into a generic discussion and summary of some alternatives, rationale, and design decisions to be made for any tree-based adaptive mesh refinement software.

Reviewer: Reviewer (Berlin)

MSC:

65	Numerical analysis

Keywords:

software; adaptive mesh refinement; parallel multiscale grid traversal; spacetree

Software:

Afivo; AMROC; Chombo; DaStGen; deal.ii; Dendro; ExaHyPE; p4est; Peano; PETSc; Racoon; Uintah; waLBerla