Description

Fidelity Pointwise uses multi-threading to improve performance in a few key areas: GUI, Examine, and the Unstructured Domain Solver. Although not listed here, there are additional tasks in Fidelity Pointwise that benefit from parallelism for at least some of their operation.

GUI and Rendering

In order to ensure that the user interface remains robust and responsive, Fidelity Pointwise separates the graphical user interface (GUI) into its own thread. The GUI thread handles all GUI interaction and ensures that visual feedback can continue while the main thread (also known as the Core) executes commands. Communication between the GUI and Core threads is handled through the Glyph scripting language.

GUI and Core Thread Diagram
Fidelity Pointwise uses separate threads for the GUI and the Core which communicate with one another through the Glyph scripting language.

This separation of GUI and computational tasks is what allows the Messages window and Status Bar to be updated and the Display window to remain responsive to view manipulations even during computationally expensive commands such as unstructured block initialization.

Multi-threading is also used to improve performance of render data generation. If multiple objects need render data computed, each object is assigned to a thread so that multiple objects can be processed simultaneously. This performance improvement is the most beneficial when render data is generated upon loading a large file with many objects.

Examine Metrics

For many of the Examine Functions, the metric for any one cell (or vertex for vertex-centered metrics) in the mesh can be computed independently from any other cell in the mesh. These types of algorithms lend themselves very easily to multi-threading since it is straightforward to split up the problem and it requires little to no communication between threads.

Multi-Threading Examine Metrics Image
Fidelity Pointwise applies multi-threading to the Examine metrics by distributing the cells (or vertices for vertex-centered metrics) among several threads and having each thread compute the metric for its portion of the cells.

In this case the cells are evenly distributed among the threads and each thread computes the metric for its portion of the mesh. Then the main thread brings together the partial results from all of the threads to form the final result.

Unstructured Domain Initialization

Since initializing or refining a single unstructured domain can occur largely independently of other domains, Fidelity Pointwise also applies multi-threading when multiple unstructured domains are being updated simultaneously. Both the Unstructured Domain Solver and Domains On Database Entities benefit from this multi-threading.

Similar to how multi-threading was applied to the Examine functions (described in the Examine Metrics section above), in this case, the list of domains is divided among the threads and each thread is responsible for updating its portion of the list.

Demonstration