A Load Balancing Package on Distributed Memory Systems and its Application to Particle-Particle Particle-Mesh (P3M) Methods

We present a tool, Bisect, for balanced decomposition of spatial domains. In addition to applying a nested bisection algorithm to determine the boundaries of each subdomain, Bisect replicates a user specified zone along the boundaries of the subdomain in order to minimize future interactions between subdomains. Results of running the tool on the Cray T3D system using both shared memory operations and MPI communications are reported and discussed. In addition, Bisect is used in a parallel implementation of a particle--particle/particle--mesh (P3M) simulation program on the Cray T3D system. The performance of the P3M program with different load--balancing criteria is evaluated and compared. The results show that the use of the Bisect package balances the load efficiently and minimizes communication on the T3D massively parallel system. 1 Introduction A wide range of scientific applications suffer from load imbalances and excessive interprocessor communications when they are ported for e..