Design of dynamic load-balancing tools for parallel applications

摘要

The design of general-purpose dynamic load-balancing tools for parallel applications is more challenging than the design of static partitioning tools. Both algorithmic and software engineering issues arise. The authors have addressed many of these issues in the design of the Zoltan dynamic load- balancing library. Zoltan has an object-oriented interface that makes it easy to use and provides separation between the application and the load-balancing algorithms. It contains a suite of dynamic loadbalancing algorithms, including both geometric and graph-based algorithms. Its design makes it valuable both as a partitioning tool for a variety of applications and as a research test-bed for new algorithmic development. In this paper, the authors describe Zoltan's design and demonstrate its use in an unstructured-mesh finite element application.