Parallel simulation of incompressible uid ows is considered on networks of homogeneous workstations. Coarse-grain parallelization of a Taylor-Galerkin=pressure-correction ÿnite element algorithm are discussed, taking into account network communication costs. The main issues include the parallelization of system assembly, and iterative and direct solvers, that are of common interest to ÿnite element and general numerical computation. The parallelization strategies are implemented on a Sun workstation cluster using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) message passing library. Test results are obtained with a maximum of nineteen workstations and various PVM conÿgurations are exhibited. Parallel e ciency close to ideal has been achieved for some strategies adopted. It is suggested that load balancing may not always be beneÿcial on distributed platforms with broadcasting communication connection. ? 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.