Software for Parallel Adaptive Refinement of Meshes

A software library has been developed for adaptive refinement of unstructured (that is, irregular) tetrahedral or triangular meshes that define two- or three-dimensional coordinates or volume elements used in parallel (that is, multiprocessor) finite-element or finite-volume computations. This library contains a suite of well-designed and efficiently implemented software modules that perform the operations of typical parallel adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) processes. An especially notable one of these operations is mesh quality control, typically guided by a local-error estimator, during successive parallel adaptive refinements. Another is balancing of computational loads among parallel processors. The library is robust and is scalable to different numbers of processors. The software in this library was developed in Fortran 90, plus a message-passing interface (MPI) sublibrary. The design of this library supports code efficiency, modularity, and portability. At present, the library is in use on a Cray T3E and SGI Origin computers and on a Beowulf-class cluster of personal computers.