Parallel Refinement of Unstructured Meshes

In this paper we describe a parallel h-refinement algorithm for unstructured finite element meshes based on the longest-edge bisection of triangles and tetrahedrons. This algorithm is implemented in PARED, a system that supports the parallel adaptive solution of PDEs. We discuss the design of such an algorithm for distributed memory machines including the problem of propagating refinement across processor boundaries to obtain meshes that are conforming and non-degenerate. We also demonstrate that the meshes obtained by this algorithm are equivalent to the ones obtained using the serial longest-edge refinement method. We finally report on the performance of this refinement algorithm on a network of workstations.

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