On Mon, Dec 22, 2025 at 5:46 AM liluo <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear PETSc developers,
>
>
> I’m using DMPlex to manage an unstructured mesh. However, in my case, the
> input mesh is actually a structured tetrahedral mesh, and its geometric
> domain is just a simple box.
>
>
> Is there any PETSc functionality or recommended approach to obtain a
> partition similar to what DMDA provides—i.e., a simple Cartesian block
> partition—when working with such a mesh in DMPlex?
>
> Any guidance or best practices would be greatly appreciated.
>
This is trivial in 2D because triangles nicely tile the box, but in 3D
tetrahedra are harder to handle.I can see three avenues:
1) Manually
You can use PlexPartitioner type user, which allows you to explicitly
indicate the cell numbers that go to each process. This is probably more
work than you want.
2) Mesh Partitioner + Refinement
You can run a partitioner on a small mesh, for which they are pretty good,
and then refine that. This is mostly what I do.
3) New algorithm
Amal Timalsina published a nice algorithm for converting hexes to tets, so
you could create a hex mesh that is partitioned exactly as you want, and
then convert it to tets, but this would mean writing new code.
Why are you using tets instead of hexes for this problem?
Thanks,
Matt
> Thank you!
>
>
> Bests,
>
> Li Luo
>
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>
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