Parallel computation on clusters of workstations is becoming one of the major trends in the study of parallel computations, because of their high computing speed, cost effectiveness and scalability. This paper presents studies of using a cluster of workstations for the ®nite element adaptive mesh analysis of a free surface seepage problem. A parallel algorithm proven to be simple to implement and ef®cient is used to perform the analysis. A network of workstations is used as the hardware of a

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... allel system. Two parallel software packages, P4 and PVM (parallel virtual machine), are used to handle communications among networked workstations. Computational issues to be discussed are domain decomposition, load balancing, and communication time. The ®nding of w P K is equivalent to solving the minimization problem J w 4 J v Vv P KY 6 where J v avY v 2 fY vY 7 Figure 2. Fixed domain formulation for example physical problem FINITE ELEMENT ADAPTIVE MESH ANALYSIS