Next: 1 Introduction
A Parallel Software Infrastructure for
Structured Adaptive Mesh Methods
(Text-only version)
(PostScript version)
Scott R. Kohn and
Scott B. Baden
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114
Abstract:
Structured adaptive mesh algorithms dynamically allocate computational
resources to accurately resolve interesting portions of a numerical
calculation. Such methods are difficult to implement and parallelize
because they rely on dynamic, irregular data structures. We have
developed an efficient, portable, parallel software infrastructure
for adaptive mesh methods; our software provides computational scientists
with high-level facilities that hide low-level details of parallelism and
resource management. We have applied our software infrastructure to the
solution of adaptive eigenvalue problems arising in materials design.
We describe our software infrastructure and analyze its performance.
We also present computational results which indicate that the uniformity
restrictions imposed by a data parallel Fortran implementation of a
structured adaptive mesh application would significantly impact
performance.
Scott R. Kohn and Scott B. Baden