The Potential of Diffusive Load Balancing at Large Scale

Abstract

Dynamic load balancing with diffusive methods is known to provide minimal load transfer and requires communication between neighbor nodes only. These are very attractive properties for highly parallel systems. We compare diffusive methods with state-of-the-art geometrical and graph-based partitioning methods on thousands of nodes. When load balancing overheads, i.e. repartitioning computation time and migration, have to be minimized, diffusive methods provide substantial benefits.