A Load Balancing Technique for Multiphase Computations
Jerrell Watts, Marc A. Rieffel, Stephen Taylor · Syracuse University Libraries (Syracuse University) · 1997
Parallel computations comprised of multiple, tightly interwoven phases of computation may require a different approach to dynamic load balancing than single-phase computations. This paper presents a load sharing method based on the view of load as a vector, rather than as a scalar. This approach allows multiphase computations to achieve higher efficiency on large-scale multicomputers than possible with traditional techniques. Results are presented for two large-scale particle simulations running on 128 nodes of an Intel Paragon and on 256 processors of a Cray T3D, respectively. INTRODUCTION Load balancing techniques already in the literature have concentrated entirely on single-phase computations (Boillat 1990; Cybenko 1989; Evans and Butt 1993; Heirich and Taylor 1995; Horton 1993; Kohring 1995; Lin and Keller 1987; Muniz and Zaluska 1995; Song 1994; Walshaw and Berzins 1995; Watts et al. 1996; Willebeek-LeMair and Reeves 1993; Williams 1991; Xu and Lau 1997). That is, they work only ...