Bachelor Thesis BCLR-2020-101

BibliographyHauser, Simon: Optimization of diffusive load-balancing for short-range molecular dynamics.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Bachelor Thesis No. 101 (2020).
73 pages, english.
Abstract

In recent years, multi-core processors have become more and more important for manufacturers, which means that developers now have to think more about how to distribute a single application sensibly over several processes. This is where load balancing comes in, allowing us to move load from an overloaded process to an underloaded process. One way of load balancing is diffusive load balancing, which is a method of moving load in the local neighborhood and therefore no global communication is needed. The advantage of this is that processes that have completed the local communication and thus the load-balancing process can continue with the next calculations. This form of load balancing is found in librepa, a library that deals with the balancing of linked-cell grids and can be used in the simulation software ESPResSo. In the course of this thesis the library has been extended with the First and Second Order Diffusion. Furthermore, a feature was added that allows to keep the initial structure of the grid constant, which means that the neighborhood of each process does not change. This feature is necessary for the Second Order Diffusion. A comparison between the methods shows that both First and Second Order Diffusion distribute the load better in the system than librepa's default and prior to this work only diffusive variant. Furthermore, we show that there is no significant overhead in using the Preserving Structure Diffusion. With the use of flow iteration the imbalance values of First and Second Order Diffusion can be improved even further.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Scientific Computing
Superviser(s)Pflüger, Prof. Dirk; Hirschmann, Steffen
Entry dateApril 9, 2021
   Publ. Computer Science