Run-time support for adaptive load balancing

Abstract

Many parallel scientific applications have dynamic and irregular computational structure. However, most such applications exhibit persistence of computational load and communication structure. This allows us to embed measurement-based automatic load balancing frame-work in run-time systems of parallel languages that are used to build such applications. In this paper, we describe such a framework built for the Converse [4] interoperable runtime system. This framework is composed of mechanisms for recording application performance data, a mechanism for object migration, and interfaces for plug-in load balancing strategy objects. Interfaces for strategy objects allow easy implementation of novel load balancing strategies that could use application characteristics on the entire machine, or only a local neighborhood. We present the performance of a few strategies on a synthetic benchmark and also the impact of automatic load balancing on an actual application. © 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.