PARALLEL DYNAMIC LOAD-BALANCING ALGORITHM FOR 3-DIMENSIONAL ADAPTIVE UNSTRUCTURED GRIDS

Adaptive local grid refinement/coarsening results in unequal distribut ion of work load among the processors of a parallel system. A novel me thod for balancing the load in cases of dynamically changing tetrahedr al grids is developed. The approach employs local exchange of cells am ong processors to redistribute the load equally. An important part of the load-balancing algorithm is the method employed by a processor to determine which cells within its subdomain are to be exchanged. Two su ch methods are presented and compared. The strategy for load balancing is based on the divide-and-conquer approach that leads to an efficien t parallel algorithm. This method is implemented on a distributed-memo ry multiple instruction multiple data system.