A TOOL FOR PARTITIONING STRUCTURED MULTIBLOCK MESHES FOR PARALLEL COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS

This paper discusses the multiblock (MB)-split load balancing tool for structured-grid multiblock Navier-Stokes solvers running on parallel computers of MIMD type. Many load-balancing algorithms and tools are a vailable for computational fluid dynamics solvers using unstructured m eshes. Most load-balancing algorithms for block-structured meshes only aim at distributing the initial blocks of the mesh over the processor s, without splitting any blocks. A more flexible load-balancing techni que uses domain decomposition and splits blocks into smaller blocks. O ne of the problems with this approach is the complexity of updating bl ock connectivity boundary conditions. The three load-balancing algorit hms are implemented and some results for realistic test cases are pres ented.