Using Multithreading for the Automatic Load Balancing of Adaptive Finite Element Meshes

In this paper, we present a multithreaded approach for the automatic load balancing of adaptive nite element (FE) meshes. The platform of our choice is the EARTH multithreaded system which ooers suucient capabilities to tackle this problem. We implement the adaption phase of FE applications on triangular meshes, and exploit the EARTH token mechanism to automatically balance the resulting irregular and highly nonuniform workload. We discuss the results of our experiments on EARTH-SP2, an implementation of EARTH on the IBM SP2, with diierent load balancing strategies that are built into the runtime system.