ABSTRACTThis paper presents a parallel algorithm for the finite-volume discretisation of the Poisson equation on three-dimensional arbitrary geometries. The proposed method is formulated by using a 2D horizontal block domain decomposition and interprocessor data communication techniques with message passing interface. The horizontal unstructured-grid cells are reordered according to the neighbouring relations and decomposed into blocks using a load-balanced distribution to give all processors an equal amount of elements. In this algorithm, two parallel successive over-relaxation methods are presented: a multi-colour ordering technique for unstructured grids based on distributed memory and a block method using reordering index following similar ideas of the partitioning for structured grids. In all cases, the parallel algorithms are implemented with a combination of an acceleration iterative solver. This solver is based on a parabolic-diffusion equation introduced to obtain faster solutions of the linear systems arising from the discretisation. Numerical results are given to evaluate the performances of the methods showing speedups better than linear.