Parallel processing of adaptive meshes with load balancing

Many scientific applications involve grids that lack a uniform underlying structure. These applications are often also dynamic in, nature in the sense that the grid structure significantly changes between successive phases of execution. In parallel computing environments, mesh adaptation of unstructured grids through selective refinement/coarsening has proven to be an effective approach. However, achieving load balance while minimizing interprocessor communication and redistribution costs is a difficult problem. Traditional dynamic load balancers are mostly inadequate because they lack a global view of system loads across processors. In this paper, we present a novel, general-purpose load balancer that utilizes symmetric broadcast networks (SBN) as the underlying communication topology. The experimental results on the IBM SP2 demonstrate that performance of the SBN-based load balancer is comparable to results achieved under PLUM, a global load balancing environment created to handle adaptive unstructured applications.