Dynamic Load Balancing using Graphics Processors

Abstract

To get maximum performance on the many- core graphics processors, it is important to have an even balance of the workload so that all processing units contribute equally to the task at hand. This can be hard to achieve when the cost of a task is not known beforehand and when new sub-tasks are created dynamically during execution. Both the dynamic load balancing methods using Static task assignment and work stealing using deques are compared to see which one is more suited to the highly parallel world of graphics processors. They have been evaluated on the task of simulating a computer move against the human move, in the famous four in a row game. The experiments showed that synchronization can be very expensive, and those new methods which use graphics processor features wisely might be required.