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A procedure to support parallel refinement and redistribution of two dimensional unstructured finite element meshes on distributed memory computers is presented. The procedure uses the mesh topological entity hierarchy as the underlying data structures to easily support the required adjacency information. Mesh refinement is done by employing links back to the geometric representation to place new nodes on the boundary of the domain directly on the curved geometry. The refined mesh is then redistributed by an iterative heuristic based on the Leiss/Reddy 9 load balancing criteria. A fast parallel tree edge-coloring algorithm is used to pair processors having adjacent partitions and forming a tree structure as a result of Leiss/Reddy load request criteria. Excess elements are iteratively migrated from heavily loaded to less loaded processors until load balancing is achieved. The system is implemented on a massively parallel MasPar MP-1 system with a SIMD style of computation and uses message passing primitives to migrate elements during the mesh redistribution phase. Performance results of the redistribution heuristics on various test meshes are given.