A Novel Coarsening Method for Scalable and Efficient Mesh Generation A Novel Coarsening Method for Scalable and Efficient Mesh Generation *

Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel mesh coarsening method called brick coarsening method. The proposed method can be used in conjunction with any graph partitioners and scales to very large meshes. This method reduces problem space by decomposing the original mesh into fixed-size blocks of nodes called bricks, layered in a similar way to conventional brick laying, and then assigning each node of the original mesh to appropriate brick. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method scales to very large meshes while allowing simple RCB partitioner to produce higher-quality partitions with significantly less edge cuts. Our results further indicate that the proposed brick-coarsening method allows more complicated partitioners like PT-Scotch to scale to very large problem size while still maintaining good partitioning performance with relatively good edge-cut metric