Spectral bisection of adaptive finite element meshes for parallel processing

In the present paper the spectral bisection method is used for partitioning finite element (FE) meshes. For adaptive FE meshes it is beneficial to ope rate on the coarse basic mesh rather than bisecting the refined model. This requires the bisection of the weighted graph corresponding to the coarse m eshes. In this paper, the spectral bisection method is improved to solve th e weighted graph partitioning problem. The adaptive FE mesh is mapped into the bisection of the associated weighted graph. The partitioning is perform ed on the initial coarse mesh, and then mesh refinements is carried out. Si nce the number of elements in the refined mesh is several times that of the initial mesh, the bisection is performed with far less effort. Examples ar e included to illustrate performance of the proposed method. The results ar e compared to those of the subdomain approach. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Lt d. All rights reserved.