Topology and Affinity Aware Hierarchical and Distributed Load-Balancing in Charm++

Abstract

The 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.