High Efficiency Computation of High Reynolds Number Flows via Anisotropic Adaptive Mesh Refinement

This STTR Phase I project aims to design, implement, and demonstrate a rigorous, practical, fast, and re-usable anisotropic mesh adaptation software module for enabling the efficient computation of high Reynolds number flows in large computational domains. To this effect, it focuses on developing: (a) a set of portable and cache-friendly dynamic data structures that ease the implementation in a hydrodynamic code of fast mesh refinement and coarsening operations, (b) a set of algorithms and corresponding numerical software for performing anisotropic mesh adaptation in general, and isotropic adaptation in particular, (c) a robust, order of accuracy preserving, and computationally efficient treatment of the problem of non-conforming mesh interfaces resulting from mesh adaptation, and (d) optimization strategies for maximizing the efficiency of adaptive implicit flow computations. Because mesh adaptation inherently destroys load balance, this STTR project also focuses on the development of a measurement-based approach for assessing workload unbalance, and a set of smart and portable algorithms for transferring data across cores or processors to evenly redistribute the computational workload in order to achieve maximum scalability on a given massively parallel processor.