Title
Machine and Application Aware Partitioning for Adaptive Mesh Refinement Applications.
Abstract
Load balancing and partitioning are critical when it comes to parallel computations. Popular partitioning strategies based on space filling curves focus on equally dividing work. The partitions produced are independent of the architecture or the application. Given the ever-increasing relative cost of data movement and increasing heterogeneity of our architectures, it is no longer sufficient to only consider an equal partitioning of work. Minimizing communication costs are equally if not more important. Our hypothesis is that an unequal partitioning that minimizes communication costs significantly can scale and perform better than conventional equal-work partitioning schemes. This tradeoff is dependent on the architecture as well as the application. We validate our hypothesis in the context of a finite-element computation utilizing adaptive mesh-refinement. Our central contribution is a new partitioning scheme that minimizes the overall runtime of subsequent computations by performing architecture and application-aware non-uniform work assignment in order to decrease time to solution, primarily by minimizing data-movement. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing it against standard space-filling curve based partitioning algorithms and observing time-to-solution as well as energy-to-solution for solving Finite Element computations on adaptively refined meshes. We demonstrate excellent scalability of our new partition algorithm up to $262,144$ cores on ORNL's Titan and demonstrate that the proposed partitioning scheme reduces overall energy as well as time-to-solution for application codes by up to 22.0%
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3078597.3078610
HPDC
Field
DocType
Citations 
Partition problem,Polygon mesh,Computer science,Load balancing (computing),Parallel computing,Adaptive mesh refinement,Finite element method,Domain decomposition methods,Computation,Scalability,Distributed computing
Conference
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
19
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Milinda Fernando120.72
Dmitry Duplyakin2112.93
Hari Sundar331227.33