Task4: Mapping and Load-balancing Summary of Work Completed (october '95 -march '96) Dynamic Load Balancing

The implementation and testing of the mapping tool box has been successfully achieved during the last period. The work on mapping consists now mainly in integrating the mapping tool box with the rest of the Sepp environment. The undergoing integration is described in the last HPCTI report. In the framework of the Sepp project, partners of the task concentrated mainly on dynamic load balancing tool. Several approaches for load balancing schedulers and algorithms are currently being explored: A semi-distributed scheduler for dynamic load balancing based on PVM internal facilities (resource manager) has been designed and partially implemented 1]. The scheduler is responsible for making decisions about the locations of new processes taking into account the load and communication overheads. A rst version is under implementation and should be available in May 96. This approach will be validated on a modiied version of WaTor (an irregular distributed simulation problem which involves complex process creation and terminaison) A rst version of the Diiusion Method has been implemented. This method solves the problem of global unbalance by taking into account the maximal diierence of load between processors of the same local domain , providing an eecient load-balanced solution 3]. The current prototype running on IBM SP-1 has been implemented in a centralised version. Tests are currently in progress to validate this approach. A parallel programming platform, Athapascan 2], providing the func-tionalities and eeciency of a thread kernel and the Pvm library was implemented and used for the development of real-size applications. The concepts underlying this approach, i.e. the remote procedure call (RPC) With contributions from the partners of the task: L.