Performance Evaluation of Static and Dynamic Load Balancing Schemes for a Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Software (CFD) Application (FLUENT) Distributed across Clusters of Heterogeneous Symmetric Multiprocessor Systems

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications are “highly parallelizable” and can be distributed across a cluster of computers. However, because computation time can vary with the distributed part (mesh), the system loads are unpredictable and processors can have widely different computation speeds. Load balancing (and thus computational efficiency) across a heterogeneous cluster of processors is a significant problem. The goal here is to minimize the execution time of a single application running in parallel on such multicomputer systems. Load balancing can be achieved through static load partitioning and dynamic load balancing policies for clusters of heterogeneous multiprocessors. In static load partitioning policies, the amount of work assigned to a processor is proportional to its processing capacity and remains the same throughout the duration of the job. In the case of dynamic load balancing, the current distribution of load is assessed periodically and adjusted if the resulting distribution results in the reduction in the remaining execution time of the job. Although the static Hari Reddy