Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

A Refinement-tree Based Partitioning Method for Dynamic Load Balancing with Adaptively Refined Grids

Published

Author(s)

William F. Mitchell

Abstract

The partitioning of an adaptive grid for distribution over parallel processors is considered in the context of adaptive multilevel methods for solving partial differential equations. A partitioning method based on the refinement-tree is presented. This method applies to most types of grids in two and three dimensions. For triangular and tetrahedral grids, it is guaranteed to produce connected partitions; no other partitioning method makes this guarantee. The method is related to the OCTREE method and space filling curves. Numerical results comparing it with several popular partitioning methods show that it computes partitions in an amount of time similar to fast load balancing methods like recursive coordinate bisection, and with mesh quality similar to slower, more optimal methods like the multilevel diffusive method in ParMETIS.
Citation
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Volume
67
Issue
4

Keywords

adaptive refinement, dynamic load balancing, grid partitioning, multilevel adaptive method, parallel finite elements, refinement tree

Citation

Mitchell, W. (2007), A Refinement-tree Based Partitioning Method for Dynamic Load Balancing with Adaptively Refined Grids, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=51315 (Accessed May 4, 2024)
Created April 1, 2007, Updated June 2, 2021