A versatile load balancing framework for parallel applications based on domain decomposition

This paper presents a general load balancing framework and two speci c load balancing algorithms that can be used for a wide range of parallel programs based on domain decomposition. Both the framework and the algorithms are versatile in the sense that they work on dedicated and non-dedicated parallel computers, and on homogeneous and heterogeneous parallel computers. The e ectiveness of the load balancing framework is demonstrated for a parallel nite element simulation on a Cray T3E and a non-dedicated heterogeneous workstation cluster.