Teleconference 2015-03-25

participants: Hank, Dave, Jeremy

• Hank: discussion of writing, essentially a VTK-m textbook simultaneously with a grad class in the Fall
  • we will discuss more later
• Jeremy, Dave: quick progress updates, some discussion on these topics:
  • grouped vs ungrouped connectivity:
    • no one has yet come up with a code that natively highly mixes cell types
    • hank suggest some algorithms (clipping, material interface, etc.) may generate highly mixed or grouped, though we're not sure that grouped performs better than mixed due to
    • there are potentially upsides and downsides to both:
      • memory usage favors grouped: minimal memory penalty in the worst case (e.g. alternating tris with quads) and moderate memory benefit in best case
      • grouped makes celltype-specific kernel launches trivially easy
      • but may be one extra indirection for grouped (must look up group index and connectivity index from cell index; either two separate cell-length arrays, or look up group index in cell-length array then look up connectivity startindex in group-length array)
    • as such, since it is pretty easy to implement both and convert between, we may simply do both
  • some brief discussion of allowing more than two topology types in a single worklet (e.g. node-and-face-and-cell to cell), decided to pass for now for lack of concrete examples; can always add later