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Zoltan: 
Parallel Partitioning, Load Balancing and Data-Management Services


The Zoltan Team

Sandia National Laboratories
Erik Boman
Cedric Chevalier
Karen Devine
Vitus Leung
Lee Ann Riesen
Ohio State University
Umit Catalyurek
Doruk Bozdag

Past Zoltan Contributors

Sandia National Laboratories:
Robert Heaphy
Bruce Hendrickson
Matthew St. John
Courtenay Vaughan

Williams College
James Teresco
National Institute of Standards and Technology
William F. Mitchell
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Jamal Faik
Luis Gervasio


Zoltan News:


Now available: Zoltan 3.1

New Features in Zoltan v3.1, released September 2008:

New Features in Zoltan 3.0, released May 2007:

New Features in Zoltan 2:

See the release notes for descriptions of new functionality and more.
The Zoltan Library provides critical data-management services to a wide range of parallel applications.  Zoltan includes many utilities needed by unstructured and/or adaptive parallel applications. These utilities include Zoltan's object-oriented interface is easy-to-use and enables Zoltan to be used by a number of different applications.  Zoltan is designed to be flexible and extensible, so different algorithms can be used, compared and added easily.

Why Zoltan is needed:

  • In some applications, work loads and/or geometric locality change as computations proceed;
    Zoltan provides dynamic redistribution of data to maintain high performance. 
    • Adaptive finite element methods
    • Particle methods
    • Contact detection algorithms
    • Multiphysics simulations
    • Adaptive physics models
  • Processors need to track off-processor data's locations in dynamic environments; Zoltan's distributed data directories allow applications to efficiently query and update off-processor data locations.
  • Unstructured and adaptive applications require complicated interprocessor communication; Zoltan's unstructured communication package manages sends and receives for application developers.
  • State-of-the-art parallel computers often do not have sophisticated debugging tools available; Zoltan's dynamic memory management package simplifies location of memory leaks and other memory errors.
Advantages of using Zoltan in applications: Advantages of using Zoltan for developing new algorithms: Zoltan philosophy and project description: Documentation: Related links:
Copyright (c) 2000-2007, Sandia National Laboratories.
The Zoltan Library and its documentation are released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). See the README file in the main Zoltan directory for more information.