Toward interoperable mesh, geometry and field components for PDE simulation development

Mesh-based PDE simulation codes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and rely on advanced meshing and discretization tools. Unfortunately, it is still difficult to interchange or interoperate tools developed by different communities to experiment with various technologies or to develop new capabilities. To address these difficulties, we have developed component interfaces designed to support the information flow of mesh-based PDE simulations. We describe this information flow and discuss typical roles and services provided by the geometry, mesh, and field components of the simulation. Based on this delineation for the roles of each component, we give a high-level description of the abstract data model and set of interfaces developed by the Department of Energy's Interoperable Tools for Advanced Petascale Simulation (ITAPS) center. These common interfaces are critical to our interoperability goal, and we give examples of several services based upon these interfaces including mesh adaptation and mesh improvement.