A Load Balancing Method for a Parallel Application Based on a Domain Decomposition

The parallel multiple front method is used in mechanical engineering to solve large sparse linear systems issued from finite element modeling. It is a parallel direct method based on a nonoverlapping domain decomposition method. The decomposition is usually built with a graph partitioning approach. However this approach is not well suited to all parallel applications. It provides computing times over the subdomains which can vary from simple to double for our parallel multiple method. We show that its computing time can be decreased by load balancing the computational volume over the subdomains. We present in this communication a sequential and a parallel version of our load balancing method which corrects in computational volume an initial decomposition issued from graph partitioning tools.