An object-oriented environment for sparse parallel computation on adaptive grids

Many numerical solutions of large scale simulation models require finer discretizations in some regions of the computational grid. When this region is not known in advance, adaptive meshing is the most convenient approach because it focuses the computational efforts on the most significant subdomain(s). However leaving the tasks of implementing adaptive meshing capabilities to the programmer would make the parallelization too much complex. We propose an approach based on an object-oriented library that brings the adaptive meshing capabilities to a wide user community without deteriorating much performance. The software framework includes a runtime support that detects the region requiring a dynamic grid refinement, manages reconfigurable data structures and masks any dynamic reconfiguration to the high-level code.