Topology and affinity aware hierarchical and distributed load-balancing in Charm++

International audienceThe evolution of massively parallel supercomputers make palpable two issues in particular: the load imbalance and the poor management of data locality in applications. Thus, with the increase of the number of cores and the drastic decrease of amount of memory per core, the large performance needs imply to particularly take care of the load-balancing and as much as possible of the locality of data. One mean to take into account this locality issue relies on the placement of the processing entities and load balancing techniques are relevant in order to improve application performance. With large-scale platforms in mind, we developed a hierarchical and distributed algorithm which aim is to perform a topology-aware load balancing tailored for Charm++ applications. This algorithm is based on both LibTopoMap for the network awareness aspects and on TREEMATCH to determine a relevant placement of the processing entities. We show that the proposed algorithm improves the overall execution time in both the cases of real applications and a synthetic benchmark as well. For this last experiment, we show a scalability up to one millions processing entities

Adaptive Data Migration in Load-Imbalanced HPC Applications

Distributed parallel applications need to maximize and maintain computer resource utilization and be portable across different machines. Balanced execution of some applications requires more effort than others because their data distribution changes over time. Data re-distribution at runtime requires elaborate schemes that are expensive and may benefit particular applications. This dissertation discusses a solution for HPX applications to monitor application execution with APEX and use AGAS migration to adaptively redistribute data and load balance applications at runtime to improve application performance and scaling behavior. This dissertation provides evidence for the practicality of using the Active Global Address Space as is proposed by the ParalleX model and implemented in HPX. It does so by using migration for the transparent moving of objects at runtime and using the Autonomic Performance Environment for eXascale library with experiments that run on homogeneous and heterogeneous machines at Louisiana State University, CSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center