Performance Analysis and Portability of the PLUM Load Balancing System

The ability to dynamically adapt an unstructured mesh is a powerful tool for solving computational problems with evolving physical features; however, an eecient parallel implementation is rather dii-cult. To address this problem, we have developed PLUM, an automatic portable framework for performing adaptive numerical computations in a message-passing environment. PLUM requires that all data be globally redistributed after each mesh adaption to achieve load balance. We present an algorithm for minimizing this remapping overhead by guaranteeing an optimal processor reassignment. We also show that the data redistribution cost can be signiicantly reduced by applying our heuristic processor reassignment algorithm to the default mapping of the parallel partitioner. Portability is examined by comparing performance on a SP2, an Origin2000, and a T3E. Results show that PLUM can be successfully ported to diierent platforms without any code modiications.