Abstract: In order to accelerate the process of mesh generation,and take full advance of various parallel environments,the parallel Delaunay tetrahedral mesh generation has become one of the active research topics in the fields of mesh generation and parallel algorithms.The paper presents the advances of research on parallel Delaunay tetrahedral mesh generation within the last twenty years.To grasp the main ideas of various parallel algorithms,according to their parallel schemes,these algorithms are classified into domain decomposition mode and node-based mode.And the algorithms of domain decomposition mode are further distinguished as the decoupled sort and the coupled sort by the complexity of communications.Then,the features of presented modes are pointed out through surveying some representative parallel Delaunay tetrahedral mesh generation algorithms with respect to the inheritance of mesh quality,ratio of reusing off-the-shelf sequential codes,scalability,load balance and fault tolerance combined with some numerical test results.Finally,some developing trends of parallel Delaunay tetrahedral mesh generation are discussed.