Publication Details
Polykarpos Thomadakis, Christos Tsolakis and Nikos Chrisochoides.
Published in Engineering with Computers, Publisher Springer, 2022
Abstract
This paper presents a new design of the Parallel Runtime Environment for Multi-computer Applications (PREMA). This framework provides large-scale applications with implicit load balancing, scheduling, and latency hiding through a simple but powerful interface. In this implementation, the framework has been augmented with multithreading, separating communication and execution into different threads to provide asynchronous message reception and instant computation execution. It allows for parallel computations while monitoring the load of the system and performing migrations. Scheduling and load balancing are enhanced by introducing custom intra-node schedulers and the ability to perform concurrent migrations. The motivation for the development of the runtime system is to provide dynamic runtime support for parallel mesh refinement applications. Evaluating the system on such an application indicates an overall performance improvement of up to 50 percent, compared to no load balancing, with an overhead of less than one percent when using up to 270 computing nodes. An improvement achieved by retaining a better work- load distribution among the execution units. Experimenting with another communication-intensive application with static load balancing, we demonstrate that no noticeable overhead is added despite the additional operations needed to monitor the load of each processing element.
