Effectiveness of a Dynamic Load Balancing Library for Scientific Applications
Chaube, R., Carino, R.L., & Banicescu, I. (2007). Effectiveness of a Dynamic Load Balancing Library for Scientific Applications. Proc. 6th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing. Hagenberg, Austria: IEEE Computer Society Press. 229-235.
Abstract
The design of a general-purpose dynamic load balancing
library for a vast variety of parallel applications is a
very challenging task. The library has to address potentially
unpredictable load imbalance in the application, to
interface with the data structures native to the application
and to achieve significant performance improvement
and scalability. In this paper we look into the design and
sample results of a new dynamic load balancing library
called LB Migrate, targeted for large scientific applications
with parallel loops as a major source of concurrency.
The applicatons must supply the library a routine that encapsulates
the computations for a chunk of loop iterates,
and the data for the computations must be stored in an array
of arbitary type. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the
library on two real applications - the profiling of an automatic
quadrature routine problem and for a simulation of
a hybrid model for image denoising. The experimental results
indicate that the library achieves up to 60% performance
improvement for these applications.