Dynamic Load Balancing Based on Constrained K-D Tree Decomposition for Parallel Particle Tracing

Journal Article · Mon Aug 28 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2017.2744059· OSTI ID:1465513

Zhang, Jiang ^[1]; Guo, Hanqi ^[2]; Hong, Fan ^[1]; Yuan, Xiaoru ^[1]; Peterka, Tom ^[2]

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1. Peking Univ., Beijing (China)
2. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)

Here, we propose a dynamically load-balanced algorithm for parallel particle tracing, which periodically attempts to evenly redistribute particles across processes based on k-d tree decomposition. Each process is assigned with (1) a statically partitioned, axis-aligned data block that partially overlaps with neighboring blocks in other processes and (2) a dynamically determined k-d tree leaf node that bounds the active particles for computation; the bounds of the k-d tree nodes are constrained by the geometries of data blocks. Given a certain degree of overlap between blocks, our method can balance the number of particles as much as possible. Compared with other load-balancing algorithms for parallel particle tracing, the proposed method does not require any preanalysis, does not use any heuristics based on flow features, does not make any assumptions about seed distribution, does not move any data blocks during the run, and does not need any master process for work redistribution. Based on a comprehensive performance study up to 8K processes on a Blue Gene/Q system, the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline approaches in both load balance and scalability on various flow visualization and analysis problems.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR); National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC); National Key Basic Research Program of China
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 1465513
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 24, Issue 1; ISSN 1077-2626
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
parallel particle tracing
dynamic load balancing
k-d trees
performance analysis