DIME: a programming environment for unstructured triangular meshes on a distributed-memory parallel processor

Abstract

DIME (Distributed Irregular Mesh Environment) is a user environment written in C for manipulation of an unstructured triangular mesh in two dimensions. The mesh is distributed among the separate memories of the processors, and communication between processors is handled by DIME; thus the user writes C-code referring to the elements and nodes of the mesh and need not be unduly concerned with the parallelism. A tool is provided for the user to make an initial coarse triangulation of a region, which may then be adaptively refined and load-balanced. DIME provides many graphics facilities for examining the mesh, including contouring and a Postscript hard-copy interface. DIME also runs on sequential machines.