Adaptive load balancing of iterative computation on heterogeneous nondedicated systems

Abstract

Dynamic load balancing in heterogeneous systems is a fundamental research topic in parallel computing due to the high availability of such systems. The efficient utilization of the heterogeneous resources can significantly enhance the performance of the parallel system. At the same time, adapting parallel codes to state-of-the-art parallel computers composed of heterogeneous multinode–multicore processors becomes a very hard task because parallel codes are highly dependent on the parallel architectures. That means that applications must be tailored requiring a great deal of programming effort. We have developed the ALBIC (Adaptive Load Balancing of Iterative Computation) system that allows for the dynamic load balancing of iterative codes in heterogeneous dedicated and nondedicated Linux based systems. In order to validate the system several parallel codes have been analyzed in different scenarios. The results show that the ALBIC approach achieves better performance than the other proposal. This lightweighted library eases porting homogeneous parallel codes to heterogeneous platforms, since the code intrusion is low and the programming effort is quite reduced.