JOSTLE is a software package designed to partition unstructed meshes (for example, finite element or finite volume meshes) for use on distributed memory parallel computers.
It can also be used to repartition and load-balance existing partitions (such as those deriving from adaptive refined meshes).
It achieves this by modelling the mesh as an undirected graph and then using state-of-the-art graph partitioning techniques.
The code is extremely fast and provides high quality multilevel partitioning and diffusive load-balancing in both serial & parallel.
Since its release in 1995, JOSTLE gained a worldwide user community of around 150 licensed sites, by groups based at Los Alamos, Argonne & Sandia National Labs (all in the USA), NASA, and in Universities across the world (specifically the USA, Canada, Brazil, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Oman, India, Japan, Singapore & Taiwan).
After 20 years as a free software package, in 2015 JOSTLE was withdrawn from service. However it has been commercialised and extended and most of the functionality is available under the name of NetWorks.
publications
You can find out more about the underlying algorithms from several
papers; probably the best to start with are:
