Static load balancing for CFD simulations on a network of workstations

Abstract

In distributed simulations, the delivered performance of networks of heterogeneous computers degrades severely if the computations are not load balanced. In this work we consider the distributed simulation of TURNS (Transonic Unsteady Rotor Navier Stokes), a 3-D space CFD code. We propose a load balancing heuristic for simulations on networks of heterogeneous workstations. Our algorithm takes into account the CPU speed and memory capacity of the workstations. Test run comparisons with the equal task allocation algorithm demonstrated significant efficiency gains.