pCamal

pCamal is an application written and maintained by the Cubit development team. It is designed to work in a distributed computing environment to generate 3D hex elements of a sweep mesh. It first uses the serial Cubit application to generate the 2D quad elements. These elements are written to a file that can then be used by pCamal to generate the most time consuming and memory intensive portion of the mesh: the 3D hex elements. The following describes how to set up the necessary inputs to pCamal using Cubit's sweeping command.

To set up for pCamal, first use the parallel meshing setting:

Set Parallel Meshing {on|OFF}

You would then use the sweep scheme and mesh your 3D volumes as normal. When Cubit performs the mesh operation on a volume that has a sweep scheme applied when the parallel meshing option is ON, only the surface entities will be meshed, leaving the hex elements for pCamal. Surfaces will be meshed with appropriate source, target and linking surface designations.

Exporting a Parallel Mesh for pCAMAL

The following command can be used for exporting a mesh in exodus format for use with pCAMAL

Export Parallel "<filename>" [Block <id_list>] [Overwrite] [Processor <number>]

The options are the same as those for the export genesis command except for the addition of the processor option.

The processor option allows the user to specify the number of processors that will be used to mesh the volume with the pCAMAL option. This same option exists in the pCAMAL application and is more often used there since the number of available processors is known then rather than when the output file is created in Cubit.

If the processor option is given, Cubit attempts to balance the number of sweepable volumes to run on N processors by converting many-to-one sweeps to one-to-one sweeps, subdividing the sweep volume along its sweep direction, or partitioning the source surface of a one-to-one sweep if the number of source quads is much larger than the number of layers.

To determine if you are currently in parallel meshing mode you may list the current status using the List Parallel command.

List Parallel Meshing

Note: pCamal is not currently distributed with the current release of Cubit. Contact the Cubit developers if you are interested in obtaining a copy of the executable for linux operating systems.