  The computation of geodesic distances is an important research topic in
Geometry Processing and 3D Shape Analysis as it is a basic component of many
methods used in these areas. In this work, we present a minimalistic parallel
algorithm based on front propagation to compute approximate geodesic distances
on meshes. Our method is practical and simple to implement and does not require
any heavy pre-processing. The convergence of our algorithm depends on the
number of discrete level sets around the source points from which distance
information propagates. To appropriately implement our method on GPUs taking
into account memory coalescence problems, we take advantage of a graph
representation based on a breadth-first search traversal that works
harmoniously with our parallel front propagation approach. We report
experiments that show how our method scales with the size of the problem. We
compare the mean error and processing time obtained by our method with such
measures computed using other methods. Our method produces results in
competitive times with almost the same accuracy, especially for large meshes.
We also demonstrate its use for solving two classical geometry processing
problems: the regular sampling problem and the Voronoi tessellation on meshes.
