Gridder-HO: Rapid and efficient parallel software for high-order curvilinear mesh generation

Abstract

The advancement in high-order computational methods is reshaping the landscape of mesh generation in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), steering the focus towards curvilinear mesh techniques to meet the escalating accuracy demands. Gridder-HO, the software designed to generate high-order curvilinear mesh efficiently and rapidly, has been developed. Gridder-HO supports the elevation of meshes to P2 (quadratic-order) or P3 (cubic-order). It features a layered architecture and utilizes the concurrent hash table and the Alternating Digital Tree (ADT) data structure, supporting thread-level parallelism to convert straight-edge mesh into high-order curvilinear mesh seamlessly. Gridder-HO utilizes the projection method based on a thread pool to precisely preserve geometry, and employs a novel localized RBF method with ADT for volume node interpolation to untangle the mesh, which aims to achieve a satisfactory balance between efficiency and accuracy. Validated through CFD simulations using the GPU-accelerated Python Flux Reconstruction (PyFR) solver, the practicality of Gridder-HO is demonstrated across various Reynolds numbers in typical cases such as sphere, cylinder, and SD7003 airfoil. These results confirm the high-order curvilinear meshes generated by Gridder-HO meet the high-order requirements of emerging computational methods. Moreover, Gridder-HO exemplifies its effectiveness in generating large-scale, high-order curvilinear meshes for the DLR-F6 transport aircraft configuration standard test cases. It elevates a mesh with 5 million elements to P2 in 3 min 39 sec at 68% parallel efficiency on 16 threads, and another with 14 million elements to P3 in 52 min 39 sec at 60% efficiency, illustrating its efficiency and potential in satisfying the demands of complex geometries in engineering applications.