Parallel dynamic load balancing strategies for adaptive irregular applications

Abstract

Dynamic unstructured mesh adaptation is a powerful technique for solving computational problems with evolving physical features; however, an efficient parallel implementation is rather difficult because of the load imbalance that mesh adaptation creates. To address this problem, we have developed two dynamic load balancing strategies for parallel adaptive irregular applications. The first, called PLUM, is an architecture-independent framework particularly geared toward adaptive numerical computations and requires that all data be globally redistributed after each adaptation to achieve load balance. The second is a more general-purpose topology-independent load balancer that utilizes symmetric broadcast networks (SBN) as the underlying communication pattern, with a goal to providing a global view of system loads across processors. Results indicate that both PLUM and the SBN-based approach have their relative merits, and that they achieve excellent load balance at the cost of minimal extra overhead.