Dynamic load balancing for parallel GFD on NT networks

Abstract

Since the price of personal computers reduces quickly and the computation power of PCs increases rapidly, parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) that was usually performed on workstations and supercomputers can now be performed on networked PCs. Many companies start to replace networked workstations by networked PCs. Since there is a large amount of idle CPU power in networked PCs, it is very attractive to use networked PCs for parallel CFD. Two approaches are commonly used for parallel computation on networked PCs. One is to run PCs with Linux operating system. The other is to run PCs with Windows NT operating system. This chapter presents development of a dynamic load balancing technique on NT operating systems. Previously developed technique of periodically measuring the computation and communication loads on distributed UNIX systems is extended to NT. Differences between the two systems are taken into account in the implementation and the experiences gained are summarized. Preliminary results indicate the applicability of the method in NT environments.