Minisymposium Presentation

Dynamic adaptive mesh refinement has proven to be a successful tool in reducing the error of scientific simulations, while maintaining competitive runtimes. By refining the mesh locally in areas of interest, the computational power and memory consumption is reduced by orders of magnitude compared to uniform meshes. However, the parallel management of adaptive meshes and their associated data is a challenging task and should be outsourced to third-party libraries. We present the open-source library t8code for scalable AMR. Contrary to existing tree-based AMR frameworks that focus on hypercubes, t8code extends the idea of using discrete space-filling curves to general element types, including prisms, pyramids and simplices. Additionally, it also supports hybrid meshes with different shapes in the same mesh. A modular approach allows to enhance t8code with additional features such as anisotropic (“2,5D”) refinement (currently work in progress) and geometric flexibility. Both of which are applied in earth system modelling. Scaling to more than one trillion mesh elements and one million parallel processes t8code is a scalable and performant alternative to unstructured meshing codes. We present the mathematical basis for tree-structured refinement, t8code’s design principles and show performance result that demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability.