Designing an efficient partitioning algorithm for grid environments with application to N-body problems

Abstract

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. This paper compares the performance of our MinEX latency-tolerant partitioner with METIS using simulated heterogeneous grid configurations. A solver for the classical N-body problem is implemented to provide a framework for the comparisons. Experimental results show that MinEX provides superior quality partitions and is competitive to METIS in execution speed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.