Toward highly parallel loading of unstructured meshes

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for highly-parallel loading and processing of unstructured mesh databases in a dis tributed memory environment of large HPC clusters without collecting data into a single process. The algorithm is proved effective, having linear speedup in the large dataset limit. Demonstrated on Ansys CDB, EnSight, VTK Legacy, and XDMF databases, we show that it is possible to efficiently reconstruct meshes with 800 million nodes and 500 million elements in several seconds on thousands of processors, even from databases that were not designed to be read in parallel. The algorithm is implemented in our MESIO library that can be used as (i) an efficient parallel loader (e.g. for numerical physical solvers) or as (ii) a high performing parallel converter between mesh databases.