itaps-parallel [Fwd: **** iMesh.h and iBase.h changes ****]

[Carl Ollivier-Gooch]

Mark Shephard wrote:
> Carl,
> 
> Although I would like to put some focus on improving mesh adapt (from 
> multiple levels) and FMDB (low level performance and memory), I do not 
> think it is going to happen in the near future since the SCOREC group 
> needs to keep focused on parallel and meeting the needs of applications 
> groups we are working with. (By the way your figure 6 showing where the 
> time is spent is quite interesting and gives great information on where 
> things need improvement - Ting and others, please note that figure and 
> table XVI.)

I've also got a callgrind profile that I'd be happy to send along now or 
in the future.  It's entirely possible that there are some places where 
a small change could make a huge difference in performance, if one 
looked in the right place.

> Therefore I am not comfortable including the memory and cpu comparisons. 
> In addition to known inefficiencies, we may be comparing apples and 
> oranges in some aspects. The mesh adapt procedures tend to include 
> substantial logic checks and decision processes not used in lots of 
> codes. My guess is that the only fair comparison is the the Native and 
> GRUMMP comparison.

I was leaning towards taking this out, but left it in primarily out of 
inertia.  I'm happy to pull the performance comparisons.

That said, we shouldn't abandon the notion of doing more complete 
performance comparisons at some point in the future.  Someone (Martin 
maybe?) floated the notion of having a set of performance kernels to 
complement the compliance test suite.  I think that's a good idea, for 
two reasons: first, it'll help all of us tune up our implementations, 
and second, it'll give a realistic (?) assessment of the tradeoffs that 
come with the different design decisions that have gone into the 
different mesh databases.  Once we have the data internally, we can then 
decide what to do about releasing it.

Carl

-- 
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Dr. Carl Ollivier-Gooch, P.Eng.                   Voice: +1-604-822-1854
Associate Professor                                 Fax: +1-604-822-2403
Department of Mechanical Engineering             email: cfog at mech.ubc.ca
University of British Columbia              http://www.mech.ubc.ca/~cfog
Vancouver, BC  V6T 1Z4                  http://tetra.mech.ubc.ca/ANSLab/
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