Mesh partitioners for computational grids: a comparison

  • Authors:

  • Sili Huang;Eric Aubanel;Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada;Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada;Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICCSA'03 Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Computational science and its applications: PartIII
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Computational grids are emerging as a new infrastructure for high performance computing. Since the resources in a grid can be heterogeneous and distributed, mesh-based applications may require a mesh partitioner that considers both processor and network heterogeneity. We have developed a heterogeneous mesh partitioner, called PaGrid. PaGrid uses a multilevel graph partitioning approach, augmented by execution time load balancing in the final uncoarsening phase. We propose that estimated execution time of the application is a better metric for the performance of a mesh partitioner than communication cost. The main objective of this paper is to compare the performance of PaGrid with two existing mesh partitioners, METIS 4.0 and Jostle 3.0, for mapping applications to a heterogeneous computational grid. We have found that PaGrid produces comparable or better partitions than Jostle. Although the performance of METIS is worse, in terms of total communication cost, than PaGrid and Jostle, it is comparable to them in terms of the estimated execution time of the application.