External Facelist Calculation with Data-Parallel Primitives

Abstract

External facelist calculation on three-dimensional unstructured meshes is used in scientific visualization libraries to efficiently render the results of operations such as clipping, interval volumes, and material boundaries. With this study, we consider the external facelist algorithm on many-core architectures. We design and introduce two novel approaches, one based on sorting and one based on hashing. Both of these algorithms consist entirely of data-parallel primitive operations, in an effort to achieve portable performance across different architectures. We study the performance of the algorithms via experiments varying over data set, hardware, and other factors. Overall, we observe that the hashing-based implementation achieves better runtime performance for the majority of configurations, while also achieving the most-stable performance on highly unstructured data sets.