A parallel solution to finding nodal neighbors in generic meshes

In this paper we specifically present a parallel solution to finding the one-ring neighboring nodes and elements for each vertex in generic meshes. The finding of nodal neighbors is computationally straightforward but expensive for large meshes. To improve the efficiency, the parallelism is adopted by utilizing the modern Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The presented parallel solution is heavily dependent on the parallel sorting, scan, and reduction. Our parallel solution is efficient and easy to implement, but requires the allocation of large device memory. • Our parallel solution can generate the speedups of approximately 55 and 90 over the serial solution when finding the neighboring nodes and elements, respectively. • It is easy to implement due to the reason it does not need to perform the mesh-coloring before finding neighbors; • There are no complex data structures, only integer arrays are needed, which makes our parallel solution very effective.