Performance evaluation of load balancing strategies for approximate string matching application on an MPI cluster of heterogeneous workstations

  • Authors:

  • Panagiotis D. Michailidis;Konstantinos G. Margaritis

  • Affiliations:

  • Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia str., GR-54006 Thessaloniki, Greece;Parallel and Distributed Processing Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia str., GR-54006 Thessaloniki, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Future Generation Computer Systems - Selected papers on theoretical and computational aspects of structural dynamical systems in linear algebra and control
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In this paper, we present three parallel approximate string matching methods on a parallel architecture with heterogeneous workstations to gain supercomputer power at low cost. The first method is the static master-worker with uniform distribution strategy, the second one is the dynamic master-worker with allocation of subtexts and the third one is the dynamic master-worker with allocation of text pointers. Further, we propose a hybrid parallel method that combines the advantages of static and dynamic parallel methods in order to reduce the load imbalance and communication overhead. This hybrid method is based on the following optimal distribution strategy: the text collection is distributed proportional to workstation's speed. We evaluated and compared the performance of the four methods with clusters one, two, four, six and eight heterogeneous workstations. The experimental results demonstrate that dynamic allocation of text pointers and hybrid methods achieve better performance than the two original ones. We also present an analytical performance model for the four methods that confirms the actual behaviour of the experimental results.