Summary: Dynamic Load Balancers for a Multithreaded
Multiprocessor System
Prasad Kakulavarapu  Olivier C. Maquelin ? Jos’e Nelson Amaral y
Guang R. Gao z
ABSTRACT
Designing multi­processor systems that deliver a reasonable price­performance ra­
tio using off­the­shelf processor and compiler technologies is a major challenge. For an
important class of applications, it is critical to explore fine­grain parallelism to achieve
reasonable performance. In such parallel systems it is essential to efficiently manage
communication latencies, bandwidth, and synchronization overheads. In this paper
we study load balancing strategies for the runtime system of a multi­threaded system.
EARTH (Efficient Architecture for Running Threads) is a multi­threaded programming
and execution model that supports fine­grain, non­preemptive, threads in a distributed
memory environment. We describe the design and implementation of a set of dynamic
load balancing algorithms, and study their performance in divide­and­conquer, regular,
and irregular applications. Our experimental study on the distributed memory multi­
processor IBM SP­2 indicate that a randomized load balancer perform as well as, and
often better than, history based load balancers.
1 Introduction
Multithreading allows the effective management of communication latencies and the effi­

Source: Amaral, José Nelson - Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences