Scientific Computing, Sandia National Laboratories
"Compatible mesh-free methods"

Abstract:

Particle and mesh-free methods offer significant computational advantages in settings where quality mesh generation required for many compatible PDE discretizations may be expensive or even intractable. At the same time, the lack of underlying geometric grid structure makes it more difficult to construct mesh-free methods mirroring the discrete vector calculus properties of mesh-based compatible and mimetic discretization methods. In this talk we survey ongoing efforts at Sandia National Laboratories to develop new classes of locally and globally compatible meshfree methods that attempt to recover some of the key properties of mimetic discretization methods. One of the approaches that will be described is motivated by classical staggered discretization methods. We use the local connectivity graph of a discretization particle to define locally compatible discrete operators. In particular, the edge-to-vertex connectivity matrix of the local graph provides a topological gradient, whereas a generalized moving least-squares (GMLS) reconstruction from the edge midpoints defines a divergence operator.

The talk will also review some of the ongoing work to build a modern software toolkit for mesh-free and particle discretizations that leverages Sandia’s Trillinos library and performance tools such as Kokkos.

This is joint work with P. Bosler, P. Kuberry, M. Perego, K. Peterson and N. Trask