Computing the distance between two finite element solutions defined on different 3D meshes on a GPU

Maxence Reberol (1) , Bruno Lévy (1)

1 ALICE - Geometry and Lighting

This article introduces a new method to efficiently compute the distance (i.e., L p norm of the difference) between two functions supported by two different meshes of the same 3D domain. The functions that we consider are typically finite element solutions discretized in different function spaces supported by meshes that are potentially completely unrelated. Our method computes an approximation of the distance by resampling both fields over a set of parallel 2D regular grids. By lever-aging the parallel horse power of computer graphics hardware (GPU), our method can efficiently compute distances between meshes with multi-million elements in seconds. We demonstrate our method applied to different problems (distance between known functions, Poisson solutions, linear elasticity solutions) using different function spaces (Lagrange polynomials from order one to seven) and different meshes (tetrahedral, hexahedral, with linear or quadratic geometry).

Mots clés: distance; field distance; finite element; error estimate; mesh comparison; approximation error; error analysis

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Ingénierie, finance et science [cs.CE]

Maxence Reberol, Bruno Lévy. Computing the distance between two finite element solutions defined on different 3D meshes on a GPU. 2017. ⟨hal-01634176⟩