MESH PARTITIONING ALGORITHMS FOR THE PARALLEL SOLUTION OF PARTIAL-DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

Most of the recently proposed computational methods for solving partial differential equations on multiprocessor architectures stem from the ''divide and conquer'' paradigm and involve some form of domain decomposition. For those methods which also require grids of points or patches of elements, it is often necessary to explicitly partition the underlying mesh, especially when working with local memory parallel processors. In this paper, a family of cost-effective algorithms for the automatic partitioning of arbitrary two- and three-dimensional finite element and finite difference meshes are presented and discussed in view of a domain-decomposed solution procedure and parallel processing.