AMR

Welcome to the AMR Working Group for HPC3 2012. Here are some of the topics that I think we can discuss in this group. More details to come.

• How AMR-ready is PyClaw? I have seen in previous e-mails that there are at least variable names like "number o grids", "levels", etc, which says the developers are thinking ahead to AMR.

• Computational efficiency, vs. ease of development of patch-based approaches vs. an octree approach. Patch based approaches have the obvious advantage that large uniform Cartesian patches can be sent off to existing single grid solvers. The disadvantage is that gridding may be less efficient (i.e. too many cells refined) than an octree approach which can more easily refine in exactly those areas that need refinement.

• To subcycle in time or not to subcycle in time? This is going to be important if large refinement ratios are expected.

• What is hard to get right is the elliptic and parabolic solvers. This maybe where we want to spend some time, noting the strengths and weaknesss of the various appraoches, especially getting good parallel performance.

• How flexible should the solver be? Should a general code handle both cell centers and node based schemes?

• What about mapped grids?

• What about GPU computing? How much of a game-changer is that the advent of GPU arrays going to be for AMR?