Franck Ledoux

I am member of the LIHPC research lab and director of research at CEA, France. I work on designing and providing meshing algorithms and software for the purpose of numerical simulations. My main research interests are about: quadrilateral and hexahedral mesh generation, mesh adaptation and mesh partitioning.

In our team, we produce quadrilateral and hexahedral mesh generation for the purpose of hydrodynamics and areodynamics codes. In this context, preferred meshes are said block-structured. It is my main research topic. Today, I consider that frame-field based global parameterizations, including Polycube, are the option to follow. As a complement, with researchers of IBISC, we investigate how to update block structures using reinforcement learning techniques.

Generating meshes for numerical simulation codes raises the question of getting the “right” mesh. Trying to answer leads to investigate how to generate/adapt a mesh considering data provided by the simulation code itself. It means to adapt the mesh to numerical fields and not only to a geometrical shape.

The last component of my research is mesh partitioning. It is a key feature for running HPC simulation codes efficiently. Our specificity is that we partition meshes and not graphs and we deal both with architecture constraints (MPI process, CPU threads, GPU threads) and code requirements (multi-stages physics, load balancing on the fly).