An Efficient Dynamic Load Balancing Algorithm for Adaptive Mesh Refinement

In numerical algorithms based on adaptive mesh refinement, the computational workload changes during the execution of the algorithms. In mapping such algorithms on to distributed memory architectures, dynamic load balancing is necessary to balance the workload among the processors in order to obtain high performance. In this paper, we propose a dynamic processor allocation algorithm for a mesh architecture that reassigns the workload in an attempt to minimize both the computational and communication costs. Our algorithm is based on a heuristic for a 2D packing problem that gives provably close to optimal solutions for special cases of the problem. We also demonstrate through experiments how our algorithm provides good quality solutions in general. 1 Introduction Parallel computers with thousands of processors are becoming a commercial reality due to advanced VLSI technolgies. These machines can provide tremendous computational power needed to solve many computationally intensive pro..