Modularity of Lowlevel Forest-of-octree Libraries

Abstract

The forest of octrees meshing paradigm has been established primarily using cubic elements. Recently, however, we have seen scalable adaptive mesh refinement codes that use triangles, tetrahedra, and prisms. While it seems that different shapes of elements require different algorithms for meshing, this is not necessarily the case. In this talk, we propose a modular approach that separates the shape-specific, per-element logic from the high-level mesh modification algorithms. This way, the latter can be coded independently of the elements' shape and other properties. We reduce redundancy and allow for future extensions of even more shapes and element orderings. We present examples of our approach using the p4est and t8code software libraries and selected numerical applications.