Efficient representation of computational meshes

We present a simple yet general and efficient approach to representation of computational meshes. Meshes are represented as sets of mesh entities of different topological dimensions and their incidence relations. We discuss a straightforward and efficient storage scheme for such mesh representations and efficient algorithms for computation of arbitrary incidence relations from a given initial and minimal set of incidence relations. It is elaborated on how the proposed concepts and data structures may be used for assembly of variational forms in parallel over distributed meshes. Benchmarks are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed data structure. Copyright \ua9 2009, Inderscience Publishers