itaps-parallel Questions about iMeshP

[Tim Tautges]

The best example, brought up by both Karen and me IIRC, is of large-deformation transient dynamics with contact, where 
the FE solution of the dynamics is solved on 3d elements on one partition, and the contact solution is solved on faces 
on a different partition.  Many believe it was this capability that made truly scalable parallel FEM with contact even 
possible.  See e.g.

Transient dynamics simulations: parallel algorithms for contact detection and smoothed particle hydrodynamics,
Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, 1996.

That's just one reference, there are many others for that particular work.

I think the details of multiple *active* partitions still need some work, both in use cases and in how they behave under 
iMeshP.  Normally I wouldn't advocate such an unexplored thing being part of the initial interface definition, but in 
this case I think it's an important enough capability that it's justified.

- tim

Mark Beall wrote:
> As a more general context to the questions that Saurabh asked, the main 
> questions we have about iMeshP are issues related to having multiple 
> partitions. Although we won't be supporting that for now (since our 
> software doesn't support that), it would be helpful in understanding 
> that need if someone could give some examples of how this functionality 
> would be used.
> 
> mark
> 
> 

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              Tim Tautges            Argonne National Laboratory
          (tautges at mcs.anl.gov)      (telecommuting from UW-Madison)
          phone: (608) 263-8485      1500 Engineering Dr.
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