Parallel Deterministic Transport Sweeps of Structured and Unstructured Meshes with Overloaded Mesh Decompositions

The efficiency of discrete ordinates transport sweeps depends on the scheduling algorithm, the domain decomposition, the problem to be solved, and the computational platform. Sweep scheduling algorithms may be categorized by their approach to several issues. In this paper we examine the strategy of domain overloading for mesh partitioning as one of the components of such algorithms. In particular, we extend the domain overloading strategy, previously defined and analyzed for structured meshes, to the general case of unstructured meshes. We also present computational results for both the structured and unstructured domain overloading cases. We find that an appropriate amount of domain overloading can greatly improve the efficiency of parallel sweeps for both structured and unstructured partitionings of the test problems examined on up to 105 processor cores.