A MULTILEVEL DIFFUSION METHOD FOR DYNAMIC LOAD BALANCING

We consider the problem of dynamic load balancing for multiprocessors, for which a typical application is a parallel finite element solution method using non-structured grids and adaptive grid refinement. This type of application requires communication between the subproblems which arises from the interdependencies in the data. A load balancing algorithm should ideally not make any assumptions about the physical topology of the parallel machine. Further requirements are that the procedure should be both fast and accurate. An new multi-level algorithm is presented for solving the dynamic load balancing problem which has these properties and whose parallel complexity is logarithmic in the number of processors used in the computation.