[petsc-dev] PETSc programming model for multi-core systems

[Barry Smith]

On Nov 11, 2010, at 7:22 PM, Jed Brown wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 02:18, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> How do you get adaptive load balancing (across the cores inside a process) if you have OpenMP compiler decide the partitioning/parallelism? This was Bill's point in why not to use OpenMP. For example if you give each core the same amount of work up front they will end not ending at the same time so you have wasted cycles.
> 
> Hmm, I think this issue is largely subordinate to the memory locality (for the sort of work we usually care about), but the OpenMP could be more dynamic about distributing work.  I.e. this could be an OpenMP implementation or tuning issue, but I don't see it as a fundamental disadvantage of that programming model.  I could be wrong.

   You are probably right, your previous explanation was better.  Here is something related that Bill and I discussed, static load balance has lower overhead while dynamic has more overhead. Static load balancing however will end up with some in-balance. Thus one could do an upfront static load balancing of most of the data then when the first cores run out of their static work they do the rest of the work with the dynamic balancing.

   Barry

> 
> Jed