Dynamic Load Balancing for Distributed Finite Element Analysis

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目将研究并行有限元分析中的动态负载平衡技术。该技术将特别适合于异构网络的分布式分析。 在高性能计算领域中，正在进行大量努力以有效地使用工作站网络的空闲计算能力。在为这样的系统设计算法的关键问题之一是负载平衡。拟议的项目提出设计处理这一问题的技术。流行的平衡方法旨在通过重新平衡整个系统来在离散时刻实现平衡状态。这个项目将探索通过利用平衡机会来保持持续（接近）平衡状态的方法。 由于参与处理器的动态变化能力和网格的不均匀适应（由于使用解决方案自适应技术的分析）在分布式分析中发生的不平衡将被处理。一个两级的方法，建议有效地纠正这些不平衡，以最小的通信开销，同时保持数据的局部性，这是非常重要的分布式实现的有限元类型的离散化的效率。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate techniques for dynamic load balancing in parallel finite element analyses. The techniques will be particularly suitable for distributed analyses on heterogeneous networks. In the area of high performance computing, significant efforts are underway to effectively use the idle computing power of workstation networks. One of the key issues in designing algorithms for such systems is that of load balancing. The proposed project offers to devise techniques for dealing with this problem. The prevalent balancing methods aim to achieve a balanced state at discrete instants in time by rebalancing the whole system. This project will explore methods to maintain a continually (near) balanced state by exploiting balancing opportunities as and when they occur. Imbalances that occur in distributed analyses due to the dynamically varying capabilities of participating processors and nonuniform adaptations of meshes (as a result of using solution adaptive techniques of analysis) will be dealt with. A two-level approach is suggested to efficiently correct these imbalances with minimal communication overhead while maintaining the data locality that is so important for the efficiency of distributed implementations of finite element type discretizations.