A parallel adaptive mesh approach for flowfields with shock waves

A simple and efficient implementation of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) with distributed-memory approach is presented. Introducing a lookup table including grid connectivity information and simplified algorithms for AMR, the procedures for reconstructing adaptive grids are carried out in parallel, with local data to a large extent. A simple static load-balancing scheme is adopted, and the grids are not repartitioned and no data redistribution is performed. A numerical example on two different parallel computers shows that the proposed implementation of AMR is effective to reduce the computational time for unsteady flows with shock waves. Received 23 October 2000 / Accepted 30 March 2001 Published online 11 June 2002