Framework for Massively Parallel Adaptive Finite Element Computational Fluid Dynamics on Tetrahedral Meshes

Abstract

In this paper we describe a general adaptive finite element framework for unstructured tetrahedral meshes without hanging nodes suitable for large scale parallel computations. Our framework is designed to scale linearly to several thousands of processors, using fully distributed and efficient algorithms. The key components of our implementation, local mesh refinement and load balancing algorithms, are described in detail. Finally, we present a theoretical and experimental performance study of our framework, used in a large scale computational fluid dynamics computation, and we compare scaling and complexity of different algorithms on different massively parallel architectures.