PARALLEL ALGORITHMS FOR ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT

Computational methods based on the use of adaptively constructed nonun iform meshes reduce the amount of computation and storage necessary to perform many scientific calculations. The adaptive construction of su ch nonuniform meshes is an important part of these methods. In this pa per, we present a parallel algorithm for adaptive mesh refinement that is suitable for implementation on distributed-memory parallel compute rs. Experimental results obtained on the Intel DELTA are presented to demonstrate that for scientific computations involving the finite elem ent method, the algorithm exhibits scalable performance and has a smal l run time in comparison with other aspects of the scientific computat ions examined. It is also shown that the algorithm has a fast expected running time under the parallel random access machine (PRAM) computat ion model.