Design and Performance of a Heterogeneous Grid Partitioner

An important characteristic of distributed grids is that they allow geographically separated multicomputers to be tied together in a transparent virtual environment to solve large-scale computational problems. However, many of these applications require effective runtime load balancing for the resulting solutions to be viable. In this paper we present a novel latency-tolerant partitioner, called MinEX, that dynamically balances processor workloads while minimizing data movement and runtime communication for applications that are executed in a parallel distributed grid environment. We also compare the performance of MinEX with that of METIS, a popular multilevel family of partitioners, using simulated heterogeneous grid configurations. A solver for the classical N-body problem is implemented to provide a framework for the comparisons. Experimental results show that the proposed MinEX partitioner provides superior quality partitions while being competitive to METIS in terms of execution speed.