Scalability of parallel applications depends on a number of characteristics, among which is efficient communication, equal distribution of work or efficient data lay-out. Especially for methods based on domain decomposition, as it is standard for, e.g., molecular dynamics, dissipative particle dynamics or particle-in-cell methods, unequal load is to be expected for cases where particles are not distributed homogeneously, different costs of interaction calculations are present or heterogeneous architectures are invoked, to name a few. For these scenarios the code has to decide how to redistribute the work among processes according to a work sharing protocol or to dynamically adjust computational domains, to balance the workload.

The seminar will provide an overview about motivation, ideas for various methods and implementations on the level of tensor product decomposition, staggered grids, non-homogeneous mesh decomposition and a recently developed phase field approach. An implementation of several methods into the load balancing library ALL, which has been developed in the Centre of Excellence E-CAM, is presented. A use case is shown for the Materials Point Method (MPM), which is an Euler-Lagrange method for materials simulations on the macroscopic level, solving continuous materials equations.

The event will run online via Zoom for registered participants, and it will be live streamed via YouTube at https://youtu.be/-LCDEnYoFiQ.

The seminar is organised in three main parts scheduled as follows

14:00 Overview of Load Balancing

14:50 Discussion

15:00 The ALL Load Balancing Library

15:20 Discussion

15:30 Balancing the Materials Point Method with ALL

15:50 Discussion

16:00 Open discussion (Streaming will stop at this point. To participate register for the Zoom meeting via the "Participate" tab)

16:30 End of meeting