Dynamic load balancing framework for unstructured adaptive computations on distributed-memory multiprocessors

The computational requirements for an adaptive solution of unsteady problems change as the simulation progresses. This causes workload imbalance among processors on a parallel machine which, in turn, requires significant data movement at runtime. We present a dynamic load-balancing framework, called JOVE, that balances the workload across all processors with a global view each time the computational mesh is adapted. JOVE has been implemented on an SP2 in MPI for portability. Experimental results for two model meshes demonstrate that mesh adaption with load balancing gives more than a sixfold improvement over one without load balancing. Furthermore, JOVE gives a 24-fold speedup on 64 processors compared to sequential execution.