Construction, analysis and numerical testing of efficient solution techniques for solving elliptic PDEs that allow for parallel implementation have been the focus of the research. A number of discretization and solution methods for solving second order elliptic problems that include mortar and penalty approximations and domain decomposition methods for finite elements and finite volumes have been investigated and analyzed. Techniques for parallel domain decomposition algorithms in the framework of PETC and HYPRE have been studied and tested. Hierarchical parallel grid refinement and adaptive solution methods have been implemented and tested on various model problems.