An important characteristic of distributed grids is that they allow geographically separated multicomputers to be tied together in a transparent virtual environment to solve large-scale computational problems. However, many of these applications require effective runtime load balancing for the resulting solutions to be viable. Recently, we developed a latency tolerant partitioner, called MinEX, specifically for use in distributed grid environments. This paper compares the performance of MinEX to that of METIS using simulated heterogeneous grid configurations. A solver for the classical N-body problem is implemented to provide a benchmark for the comparisons. Simulation results show that MinEX provides superior quality partitions while being competitive to METIS in speed of execution.