Performance Assessment of Diffusive Load Balancing for Distributed Particle Advection

Computer Science Research Notes, pp. 6–15

Abstract

Particle advection is the approach for extraction of integral curves from vector fields. Efficient parallelization of particle advection is a challenging task due to the problem of load imbalance, in which processes are assigned unequal workloads, causing some of them to idle as the others are performing compute. Various approaches to load balancing exist, yet they all involve trade-offs such as increased inter-process communication, or the need for central control structures. In this work, we present two local load balancing methods for particle advection based on the family of diffusive load balancing. Each process has access to the blocks of its neighboring processes, which enables dynamic sharing of the particles based on a metric defined by the workload of the neighborhood. The approaches are assessed in terms of strong and weak scaling as well as load imbalance. We show that the methods reduce the total run-time of advection and are promising with regard to scaling as they operate locally on isolated process neighborhoods.

Authors 5

1. Ali Can Demiralp Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074 , Aachen , Germany

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074, Aachen, Germany

2. Dirk Norbert Helmrich

   Forschungszentrum Jülich

   Affiliation as printed

   Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Wilhelm-Johnen-Strasse 52428 , Jülich , Germany

   Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Wilhelm-Johnen-Strasse 52428, Jülich, Germany

3. Joachim Protze Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074 , Aachen , Germany

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074, Aachen, Germany

4. Torsten Kuhlen
5. Tim Gerrits Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074 , Aachen , Germany

   RWTH Aachen Kopernikusstrasse 6 52074, Aachen, Germany