Partitioning finite element meshes using space-filling curves

Using space-filling curves to partition unstructured finite element meshes is a widely applied strategy when it comes to distributing load among several computation nodes. Compared to more elaborated graph partitioning packages, this geometric approach is relatively easy to implement and very fast. However, results are not expected to be as good as those of the latter. In this paper we present results of our experiments comparing the quality of partitionings computed with different types of space-filling curves to those generated with the graph partitioning package Metis.