Title

Load balancing in parallel battlefield management simulation on local- and shared-memory architectures

Authors

Authors

N. Deo; M. Medidi;S. K. Prasad

Comments

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Abbreviated Journal Title

Comput. Syst. Sci. Eng.

Keywords

load balancing; static and dynamic allocation; battlefield management; simulation; parallel time-driven simulation; Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture; Computer Science, Theory &; Methods

Abstract

Load balancing is a critical issue for exploiting parallelism in any application and, particularly, in battlefield management simulation where the computational load dynamically changes with both time and space. Domain decomposition is an effective means to balance the load distribution in battlefield simulation. However, finer domain decompositions that lead to a better load balance incur heavier communication overhead. Earlier attempts at parallelizing battlefield simulation have traded load balance in favor of low communication overhead. We present three parallel battlefield management simulators, implemented on Intel's iPSC/2 and BBN's GP1000 multicomputers, with finer domain decomposition and address the communication overhead problem by processor allocation strategies that suit the underlying architecture of each machine. On the shared-memory GP1000, the strategy leads to a simulator with dynamic load balancing. Execution times of these simulators are provided, which show that the communication overhead is tolerable. Relevant details of the programs, data structures, and synchronisation mechanisms are included. The timing data collected have also been analyzed using Mathematica to obtain relative significance of the various simulator parameters and their interactions.

Journal Title

Computer Systems Science and Engineering

Volume

13

Issue/Number

1

Publication Date

1-1-1998

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

55

Last Page

65

WOS Identifier

WOS:000072237700007

ISSN

0267-6192

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