A Fast Cache Oblivious Mesh Layout with Theoretical Guarantees

One important bottleneck when visualizing large data sets is the data transfer between processor and memory. Cache-aware (CA) and cache-oblivious (CO) algorithms take into consideration the memory hierarchy to design cache efficient algorithms. CO approaches have the advantage to adapt to unknown and varying memory hierarchies. Recent CA and CO algorithms developed for 3D mesh layouts significantly improve performance of previous approaches. However, these algorithms are based on heuristics. We propose in this paper a new CO algorithm for meshes that has both a low theoretical complexity and proven quality. We guarantee that a coherent traversal of an N-size mesh in dimension d will induce less than N/B+N/M^{1/d}) cache misses where B and M are the block size and the cache size. We compare our layout with previous ones on several 3D meshes.