On Thursday August 25 2011, Dr. Tobias Weinzierl (Technische Universität München) will give a talk on Peano — a Framework for PDE Solvers On Spacetree Grids. The talk will be given at the auditorium of IMEC (Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven). External visitors should register at imec’s Reception. Here is information on how to reach imec by various means of transportation.

The event is free of charge, but you have to register by sending an e-mail to Bart Verleye  (bartverleyecskuleuvenbe?subject=&cc=&bcc=&body=)  , indicating the number of persons attending the event.

Peano — a Framework for PDE Solvers On Spacetree Grids

Dr. Tobias Weinzierl (Technische Universität München)

Peano is an open source PDE solver framework developed at Technische Universitaet Muenchen. It is based upon the fact that spacetrees, a generalisation of the classical octree concept, yield a cascade of adaptive Cartesian grids. Consequently, any spacetree traversal is equivalent to an element-wise traversal of the hierarchy of the adaptive Cartesian grids. The software Peano provides such a grid traversal and storage algorithm offering a couple of useful properties:

• Support for arbitrary dynamic adaptivity
• Support for arbitrary spatial dimensions
• An inherent geometric multiscale representation of the computational domain
• Very low memory requirements (~10 Bytes per unknown) to store the complete dynamically adaptive Cartesian grid
• Good cache and memory bus behaviour
• Support for shared and distributed memory parallelisation

While the software was originally written for matrix-free geometric multigrid solvers in computational fluid dynamics, it has meanwhile emancipated from this single purpose and became a general-purpose grid management and traversal tool.

This talk consists of three parts. First, it introduces the paradigm and algorithm underlying Peano. The spacetree idea hereby is combined with the well-known concept of space-filling curves and classical depth-first traversal schemes. Second, the talk gives a brief overview of selected interesting projects realised on top of Peano that benefit from the software’s properties. Finally, Peano’s architecture and programming philosophy are outlined: As an open source tool, it is important that the software is easily accessible and that it can be used for rapid prototyping even though its focus on high performance computing aspects. An outlook on open issues, promising new developments, but also challenges and shortcomings of the software that are to be tackled closes the presentation.