The Full Domain Partition Approach to Parallel Adaptive Refinement

Abstract

The combination of adaptive refinement, multigrid and parallel computing for solving partial differential equations is considered. In the full domain partition approach, each processor contains a partition of the grid plus the minimum number of additional coarse elements required to cover the whole domain. A parallel adaptive refinement algorithm using the full domain partition is presented. The method is a small modification of a sequential adaptive refinement algorithm, and uses no interprocessor communication during the refinement process. The only communication is one global reduction before refinement and three all-to-all communication steps for synchronization after the refinement is completed. Numerical computations on a network of up to 4 workstations show that parallel efficiency rates of 85% to near 100% can be obtained.