Control over the "valence" of p4est distributed meshes

[blais...@gmail.com]

Dear all,

I hope you are well.

I know that P4est as a partitioner has limitations compared to other approaches like Metis or Scotch. However, I was wondering if there was anyway to penalize the partitioner in order to generate the smaller valence that is possible? Sometimes we end up with interfaces between processors that are substantially big (or islands of a few cells). The issue is that for our particle code, this generates a ton of Ghost particles and these particles generate additional cost (collisions become significantly more expensive to calculate because we cannot apply newton's third law for a collision. The calculation becomes essentially duplicated). 

I was wondering if there was any ways to "force" or ensure that the interfaces between subdomains remained relatively well-posed?

Thank you very much!

Bruno

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

Bruno:
No, p4est partitions a space-filling curve. You can select where the partition
points along this one-dimensional line are (by choosing weights for each
cell), but you can't change the curve or what subdomain interfaces this creates.

If that's what you need, you'll have to use the fullydistributed triangulation
class that allows you to do that.

Best
W.

--
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Wolfgang Bangerth email: bang...@colostate.edu
www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/