In this article, we present Dendro, a suite of parallel algorithms for the discretization and solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) involving second-order elliptic operators. Dendro uses trilinear finite element discretizations constructed using octrees. Dendro, comprises four main modules: a bottom-up octree generation and 2:1 balancing module, a meshing module, a geometric multiplicative multigrid module, and a module for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). Here, we focus on the multigrid and AMR modules. The key features of Dendro are coarsening/refinement, inter-octree transfers of scalar and vector fields, and parallel partition of multilevel octree forests. We describe a bottom-up algorithm for constructing the coarser multigrid levels. The input is an arbitrary 2:1 balanced octree-based mesh, representing the fine level mesh. The output is a set of octrees and meshes that are used in the multigrid sweeps. Also, we describe matrix-free implementations for the discretized PDE operators and the intergrid transfer operations. We present results on up to 4096 CPUs on the Cray XT3 ("BigBen") , the Intel 64 system ("Abe"), and the Sun Constellation Linux cluster ("Ranger").