A multithreaded extension to Voro++ for rapid analysis of particle systems

The Voronoi tessellation is a widely used technique in computational geometry, and has proven effective in many branches of physics for analyzing systems of grains, particles, or atoms. Voro++ is a C++ software library for computing the Voronoi tessellation that was released in 2009. Here, we take advantage of modern computer hardware, and extend the original serial version to allow for parallel computation of Voronoi cells on multi-core computers. We look at the best parallel strategies to generate Voronoi diagrams for different particle distributions (e.g. homogeneous, clustered, or localized), and we show near-perfect parallel efficiency in the performance in many cases, allowing systems with millions of particles to be analyzed in a reasonable timeframe. We demonstrate an example usage of the library to characterize high temperature crystalline systems using a topological analysis of Voronoi cells.