Thank you for the quick reply and the info. We'll give it a shot and
respond if we hit any snags.
-Cameron
On 8/13/20 9:54 AM, Matthew Knepley wrote:
On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 9:38 AM Cameron Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello,
We have a partitioned mesh that we want to create a DMPlex from that
has
the same distribution of elements (i.e., assignment of elements to
processes) and vertices 'interior' to a process (i.e., vertices not on
the inter-process boundary).
We were trying to use DMPlexCreateFromCellListParallelPetsc() or
DMPlexBuildFromCellListParallel() and found that the vertex ownership
(roots in the returned Vertex SF) appears to be sequentially
assigned to
processes based on global vertex id. In general, this will not match
our mesh distribution. As we understand, to subsequently set vertex
coordinates (or other vertex data) we would have to utilize a star
forest (SF) communication API to send data to the correct process. Is
that correct?
Alternatively, if we create a dmplex object from the elements that
exist
on each process using DMCreateFromCellList(), and then create a SF from
mesh vertices on inter-process boundaries (using the mapping from local
to global vertex ids provided by our mesh library), could we then
associate the dmplex objects with the SF? Is it as simple as calling
DMSetPointSF()?
Yes. If you have all the distribution information, this is the easiest
thing to do.
If manually defining the PointSF is a way forward, we would like some
help understanding its definition; i.e., which entities become roots
and
which become leaves. In DMPlexBuildFromCellListParallel()
Short explanation of SF:
SF stands for Star-Forest. It is a star graph because you have a single
root that points to multiple leaves. It is
a forest because you have several of these stars. We use this construct
in many places in PETSc, and where it
is used determines the semantics of the indices.
The DMPlex point SF is an SF in which root indices are "owned" mesh
points and leaf indices are "ghost" mesh
points. You can take any set of local Plexes and add an SF to make them
a parallel Plex.
The SF is constructed with one-sided data. Locally, each process
specifies two things:
1) The root space: The set of indices [0, Nr) which refers to
possible roots on this process. For the pointSF, this is [0, Np) where
Np is the number of local mesh points.
2) The leaves: Each leaf is a pair (local mesh point lp, remote mesh
point rp) which says that local mesh point lp is a "ghost" of remote
point rp. The remote point is
given by (rank r, local mesh point rlp) where rlp is the local
mesh point number on process r.
With this, the Plex will automatically create all the other structures
it needs.
https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/blob/753428fdb0644bc4cb7be6429ce8776c05405d40/src/dm/impls/plex/plexcreate.c#L2875-2899
the PointSF appears to contain roots for elements and vertices and
leaves for owned vertices on the inter-process boundary. Is that
correct?
No, the leaves are ghost vertices. They point back to the owner.
Thanks,
Matt
Thank-you,
Cameron
--
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which
their experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/ <http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/>
