CSE Symposium Keynote
TITLE: Developing Interoperable Meshing and Discretization Components
DATE: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
TIME: 9:00 A.M.
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL
ABSTRACT
Typically the first step in numerically solving a PDE-based application
is to generate a discrete representation of the computational domain
(the mesh) and approximate the continuous differential operators and
solution field on that mesh (the discretization). Over the years, a
variety of mesh generation tools and discretization methods have been
developed that offer different advantages and disadvantages for
different application regimes. In addition, advanced techniques and
software tools that provide adaptive mesh refinement, time-varying
meshes, mesh-to-mesh data transfer, and parallel decomposition of the
mesh have been shown to have significant impact on the application
areas that employ them. In each case, the software tools providing
these advanced capabilities are becoming increasingly accepted by the
scientific community, but it is often not clear a
priori which techniques are best suited to solve a
particular application problem. Ideally, the application scientist
would be able to easily insert and experiment with a number of
different meshing and discretization software tools, but the
application programming interfaces are rarely compatible, making
experimentation a labor intensive and error prone code modification
process. The Terascale Simulation Tools and Technologies (TSTT)
Center has been funded by the Department of Energy's SciDAC initiative
to address the barriers preventing easy interoperability and
interchangeability of multiple mesh and discretization strategies
within a single simulation. We are focusing our effort on the creation
of common interfaces for existing TSTT Center technologies that will
allow them to interoperate with each other to provide fundamentally
increased capabilities and to allow application scientists to switch
among them easily. I describe the current status of our interface
definition effort, the tradeoffs required to balance performance and
flexibility, the tools used to address language interoperability
issues, and our approach to simplifying the adoption process. To
ensure the relevance of our research and software developments, we
collaborate closely with both SciDAC application researchers and other
technology centers. In particular, I will describe the use of the TSTT
interfaces and philosophy to insert advanced adaptive mesh refinement
(AMR) and error estimation procedures into an accelerator modeling
code, to develop a new capability that combines front tracking and AMR,
and to deploy a TSTT-compliant mesh quality improvement toolkit into
three mesh generation codes in as many days.
BIOGRAPHY
Lori Freitag Diachin is the Research Program Manager and Point of
Contact for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science projects
in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. Her research interests are in the area of
numerical analysis and scientific computing software development. In
particular, she is active in both the Terascale Simulation Tools and
Technologies SciDAC center and the Common Component Architecture
forum. She has worked on optimization-based mesh quality improvement
algorithms and their deployment in the software toolkits, the
development of interoperable meshing and discretization software, and
interactive access to remote large-scale data.
Diachin earned her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of
Virginia in 1992. She also holds a Masters of Applied Mathematics from
the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Mathematics from Edinboro
University of Pennsylvania. She joined Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in 2003.