News & Announcements

February 28, 2011

"New mesh software released"

Many scientific applications are modeled by partial differential equations. One of the most widely used approaches for solving such equations numerically is to decompose the problem domain into a discretized representation referred to as a “mesh.”

The Mesh-Oriented datABase (MOAB) is a software component developed at Argonne National Laboratory for representing and evaluating mesh data. The newest release, MOAB 4.0, includes support for parallel mesh reading, writing, and communication. Also included are other important mesh-based capabilities: mesh-to-mesh solution transfer, fast ray tracing, and interfaces to key services such as parallel partitioning, mesh visualization, and geometric modeling. The functional interface to MOAB is simple yet powerful, allowing the representation of many types of metadata commonly found on the mesh. MOAB also is optimized for efficiency in space and time.

“MOAB can store both structured and unstructured finite element meshes—critical in addressing complex engineering analysis problems such as fusion modeling,” said Tim Tautges, a computational scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division and lead developer of MOAB.

MOAB has been used, for example, as a bridge to couple results in multiphysics analysis and to link these applications with other mesh services for nuclear reactor simulation.Moreover, initial results indicate that the data abstraction in MOAB is powerful enough to handle many different kinds of mesh data found in applications involving geometric topology groupings and interprocessor interface representation.

Development of MOAB is supported by the DOE SciDAC Center for Interoperable Technologies for Advanced Petascale Simulations (ITAPS). MOAB is released under an open-source Lesser General Public License. The MOAB software can be used on a wide range of computing platforms, from workstations to clusters and high-end parallel systems such as the IBM Blue Gene/P and Cray computers, and has been demonstrated to scale to at least 16,000 processors.

Further information about downloading and documentation is available on the website: http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/ITAPS/wiki/MOAB#MOAB:AMesh-OrienteddatABase