Dynamic load‐balancing for PDE solvers on adaptive unstructured meshes

Modern PDE solvers written for time‐dependent problems increasingly employ adaptive unstructured meshes (Flaherty et al. , 1989) in order to both increase efficiency and control the numerical error. If a distributed memory parallel computer is to be used, there arises the significant problem of dividing the domain equally amongst the processors whilst minimising the inter‐subdomain dependencies. A number of graph‐based algorithms have recently been proposed for steady‐state calculations. The paper considers an extension to such methods which renders them more suitable for time‐dependent problems in which the mesh may be changed frequently.