Coupling Simulation and Mesh Generation using
Computational Topology

Many simulation algorithms depend on an underlying spatial discretization---a mesh that decomposes the domain into a finite set of elements that can be analyzed by a computer. The quality of the simulation is, in part, determined by the quality of the mesh. However, in the past, mesh generation and simulation were done as separate processes. Better results can be achieved by tightly integrating simulation with mesh generation and recent advices in computational topology provide the key to doing so. Computational topology allows for the analysis of the structure of data---in this case simulation variables. By understanding the structure of the simulation the mesh generation algorithms can adapt to it, providing meshes that are closely linked to the actual simulation.

Because simulation is a powerful tool for discovery throughout computational science, this research has the potential to have broad impact across all fields of science and enable new scientific breakthroughs that could have tremendous societal impact. This research will also produce open-source software, short courses, and workshops around the topic of coupling simulation and meshing. The interdisciplinary nature of this project will lead to a rich educational and research environment for graduate and undergraduate students.

Team Members

Principal Investigators

Adam Bargteil, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Joshua A. Levine, University of Arizona
Valerio Pascucci, University of Utah
Tamar Shinar, University of California - Riverside

Senior Personnel

Peer-Timo Bremer, University of Utah
Attila Gyulassy, University of Utah

Graduate Students

Muzaffer Akbay, University of California - Riverside
Laura Lediaev, University of Utah
Alex Dahl, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Yuping Zhang, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Qingyuan Zheng, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Jixian Li, University of Arizona

Undergraduate Students

Alec Laurie, Univerisity of Maryland - Baltimore County

Alumni

John Edwards, Post-doc, University of Utah
Mathew Berger, Post-doc, University of Arizona now at Vanderbilt University
Harsh Bhatia, PhD, University of Utah
Haimasree Bhattacharya, PhD, University of Utah
Dan Gerszewski, PhD, University of Utah
Ben Jones, PhD, University of Utah
Benafsh Husain, MS, Clemson University
Wojciech Karas, MS, University of California - Riverside
Alex Stuart, MS, University of Utah
Xiaokai Li, MS, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Michael Falkenstein, MS, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Zhi Zhang, MS, Clemson University
April Martin, Undergraduate, University of Utah

Publications

Books and Chapters

	J. Bennett, F. Vivodtzev, V. Pascucci Topological and Statistical Methods for Complex Data: Tackling Large-Scale, High-Dimensional, and Multivariate Data Spaces Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2015.
	H. Bhatia, A. Gyulassy, H. Wang, P.-T. Bremer, V. Pascucci Robust Detection of Singularities in Vector Fields Topological Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization III, Springer, 2014.
	J. A. Levine, D. Thompson, J. C. Bennett, P.-T. Bremer, A. Gyulassy, V. Pascucci, P. Pebay Analysis of Uncertain Scalar Data with Hixels Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization, Springer, 2014.

SIGGRAPH Course

Adam W. Bargteil and Tamar Shinar
An Introduction to Physics-based Animation.
SIGGRAPH '18: ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Courses, August 2018.

Journal Articles

	M Akbay, N Nobles, V Zordan, T Shinar An extended partitioned method for conservative solid-fluid coupling ACM Transaction on Graphics, August 2018, Vol. 37, No 4.
	X. Li, S. Andrews, B. Jones, and A. W. Bargteil Energized Rigid Body Fracture. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, July 2018, Vol. 1, No 1.
	M. Berger, J. Li, J. A. Levine Generative Model for Volume Rendering IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Early Access), March, 2018.
	J. Tierny, G. Favelier, J. A. Levine, C. Gueunet, M. Michaux The Topology ToolKit IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics, January, 2018, Vol. 24, No. 1.
	B. Jones, N. Thuerey, T. Shinar, and A. W. Bargteil Example-based Plastic Deformation of Rigid Bodies. ACM Transactions on Graphics, July 2016, Vol. 35, No 4.
	M. Berger, A. Tagliasacchi, L. M. Seversky, P. Alliez, G. Guennebaud, J. A. Levine, A. Sharf, C. T. Silva A Survey of Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds Comput. Graph. Forum, February 2016, Vol. 36, No. 1.
	A. Gyulassy, A. Knoll, K. C. Lau, B. Wang, P.-T. Bremer, M. E. Papka, L. A. Curtiss, V. Pascucci Interstitial and Interlayer Ion Diffusion Geometry Extraction in Graphitic Nanosphere Battery Materials IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2016, Vol. 22, No. 1.
	P.-T. Bremer, D. Maljovec, A. Saha, B. Wang, J. Gaffney, B. K. Spears, V. Pascucci ND2AV: N-dimensional data analysis and visualization analysis for the National Ignition Campaign Computat. and Visualiz. in Science, 2015, Vol. 17, No. 1.
	S. Liu, B. Wang, J. J. Thiagarajan, P.-T. Bremer, V. Pascucci Visual Exploration of High-Dimensional Data through Subspace Analysis and Dynamic Projections Comput. Graph. Forum, 2015, Vol. 34, No. 3.
	B. Summa, A. A. Gooch, G. Scorzelli, V. Pascucci Paint and Click: Unified Interactions for Image Boundaries Comput. Graph. Forum, 2015, Vol. 34, No. 2.
	J. Edwards, E. Daniel, V. Pascucci, C. L. Bajaj Approximating the Generalized Voronoi Diagram of Closely Spaced Objects Comput. Graph. Forum, 2015, Vol. 34, No. 2.
	B. Jones, J. Popovic, J. McCann, W. Li, A. W. Bargteil Dynamic Sprites: Artistic Authoring of Interactive Animations Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, March/April 2015, Vol. 26, No. 2.
	D. Gerszewski, L. Kavan, P.-P. Sloan, A. W. Bargteil Basis Enrichment and Solid-fluid Coupling for Model-reduced Fluid Simulation Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, March/April 2015, Vol. 26, No. 2.
	H. Bhattacharya, Y. Gao, A. W. Bargteil A Level-set Method for Skinning Animated Particle Data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, March 2015, Vol. 21, No. 3.
	H. Bhatia, Bei Wang, G. Norgard, V. Pascucci, P. T. Bremer. Local, Smooth, and Consistent Jacobi Set Simplification Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications , 2015, Vol. 48, No. 4.
	Attila Gyulassy, David Guenther, Joshua A. Levine, Julien Tierny, and Valerio Pascucci Conforming Morse-Smale complexes. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, December 2014, Vol. 20, No. 12.
	H. Bhatia, V. Pascucci, P.-T.Bremer The Natural Helmholtz-Hodge Decomposition for Open-Boundary Flow Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Novemeber 2014, Vol. 20, No. 11.
	J. R. Bronson, S. P. Sastry, J. A. Levine, R. T. Whitaker. Adaptive and Unstructured Mesh Cleaving. Procedia Engineering (Proc. 23rd International Meshing Roundtable), Oct 2014, Vol. 82, No 0.
	H. Bhatia, V. Pascucci, R. M. Kirby, P.-T. Bremer Extracting Features from Time-Dependent Vector Fields Using Internal Reference Frames. Computer Graphics Forum, 2014, Vol. 33, No. 3.
	A. Gyulassy, P.T. Bremer, R. Grout, H. Kolla, J. Chen, V. Pascucci Stability of Dissipation Elements: A Case Study in Combustion. Computer Graphics Forum, 2014, Vol. 33, No. 3.
	A. W. Bargteil, Elaine Cohen Animation of Deformable Bodies with Quadratic Bézier Finite Elements. ACM Transactions on Graphics, May 2014, Vol. 33, No 3.
	B. Jones, S. Ward, A. Jallepalli, J. Perenia, A. W. Bargteil Deformation Embedding for Point-based Elastoplastic Simulation ACM Transactions on Graphics, March 2014, Vol. 33, No 2.
	D. Maljovec, B. Wang, A. Kupresanin, G. Johannesson, V. Pascucci, P.-T. Bremer Adaptive Sampling with Topological Scores. International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification, 2013, Vol. 3, No 2.

Conference & Workshop Papers

	M. Falkenstein, B. Jones, J. A. Levine, T. Shinar, and A. W. Bargteil Reclustering for large plasticity in clustered shape matching. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Motion in Games. Barcelona, Spain, November 2017.
	B. Jones, J. A. Levine, T. Shinar, and A. W. Bargteil Efficient Collision Detection for Example-based Deformable Bodies. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Motion in Games. Barcelona, Spain, November 2017.
	H. Bhatia, A. Gyulassy, V. Pascucci, M. Bremer, M. T. Ong, V. Lordi, E. W. Draeger, J. E. Pask, P.-T. Bremer Interactive exploration of atomic trajectories through relative-angle distribution and associated uncertainties Proceedings of IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, Taipei, Taiwan, Apr 2016.
	B. Jones, A. Martin, J. A. Levine, T. Shinar, and A. W. Bargteil Ductile Fracture for Clustered Shape Matching Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, Redmond, WA, February 2016.
	{D. Maljovec, S. Liu, B. Wang, D. Mandelli, P.-T. Bremer, V. Pascucci, C. Smith Analyzing simulation-based PRA data through traditional and topological clustering: A BWR station blackout case study Proceedings of Rel. Eng. & Sys. Saftey , 2016.
	C. Watcharopas, Y. Sapra, R. Geist, J. A. Levine Extracting Surface Geometry from Particle-Based Fracture Simulations Proceedings of International Symposium on Visual Computing , Las Vegas, NV, Dec 2015.
	B. Jones, A. Martin, J. A. Levine, T. Shinar, and A. W. Bargteil Clustering and Collision Detection for Clustered Shape Matching Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Motion in Games, Paris, France, November 2015.
	R. Geist, J. A. Levine, J. Westall A problem-based learning approach to GPU computin Proceedings of the Workshop on Education for High-Performance Computing , Austin, TX, Nov 2015.
	B. Husain, A. Gimenez, J. A. Levine, T. Gamblin, P.-T. Bremer Relating memory performance data to application domain data using an integration API Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Visual Performance Analysis , Austin, TX, Nov 2015.
	A. Gyulassy, A. Knoll, K. C. Lau, B. Wang, P.-T. Bremer, M. E. Papka, L. A. Curtiss, V. Pascucci Morse-Smale Analysis of Ion Diffusion in Ab Initio Battery Materials Simulations. Proceedings of Topology-Based Methods in Visualization (TopoInVis), 2015.
	A. W. Bargteil, B. Jones Strain Limiting for Clustered Shape Matching Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Motion in Games, Los Angeles, California, November 2014. Best Presentation Award
	S. Kumar, J. Edwards, P.-T. Bremer, A. Knoll, C. Christensen, V. Vishwanath, P. Carns, J. A. Schmidt, V. Pascucci Efficient I/O and Storage of Adaptive-Resolution Data. Proceedings of International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis,, New Orleans, LA, November 2014.
	A. G. Landge, V. Pascucci, A. Gyulassy, J. C. Bennett, H. Kolla, J. Chen, and P.-T. Bremer In-Situ Feature Extraction of Large Scale Combustion Simulations Using Segmented Merge Trees. Proceedings of International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis,, New Orleans, LA, November 2014.
	J. A. Levine, A. W. Bargteil, C. Corsi, J. Tessendorf, R. Geist A Peridynamic Perspective on Spring-Mass Fracture. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 2014.
	H. Bhattacharya, J. Levine, A. W. Bargteil Fluid Simulation on Arbitrary Quadrilateral Surface Meshes. Proceedings of Structured Meshing: Theory, Applications, and Evaluation, Houstin, Texas, May 2014.
	Matthew Berger, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Lee M. Seversky, Pierre Alliez, Joshua A. Levine, Andrei Sharf, and Claudio T. Silva. State of the art in surface reconstruction from point clouds. Eurographics - STARs, Strasbourg, France, April 2014.
	B. Jones, J. Popovic, J. McCann, W. Li, A. W. Bargteil Dynamic Sprites. Proceedings of ACM Motion in Games, Dublin, Ireland, November 2013.
	A. Stuart, J. Levine, B. Jones, A. W. Bargteil Automatic Construction of Coarse, High-quality Tetrahedralizations that Enclose and Approximate Surfaces for Animation. Proceedings of ACM Motion in Games, Dublin, Ireland, November 2013.
	D. Gerszewski, L. Kavan, P.-P. Sloan, A. W. Bargteil Enhancements to Model-reduced Fluid Simulation. Proceedings of ACM Motion in Games, Dublin, Ireland, November 2013.

Software

M. Berger, J. Li, J. A. Levine
tfGAN (software for A Generative Model for Volume Rendering
2018.

	J. Tierny, G. Favelier, J. Levine, C. Gueunet, M. Michaux. The Topology ToolKit 2017.
	B. Jones, J. Levine, T. Shinar, A. Bargteil Shape Matching. 2015.
	H. Bhattacharya, A. Bargteil Particle Skinning. 2014.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1314896, 1654221 (previously 1314757), 1314813.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Last updated: 10/11/18

Coupling Simulation and Mesh Generation usingComputational Topology