Distributing and Load Balancing Sparse Fluid Simulations

This paper describes a general algorithm and a system for load balancing sparse fluid simulations. Automatically distributing sparse fluid simulations efficiently is challenging because the computational load varies across the simulation domain and time. A key challenge with load balancing is that o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer graphics forum Vol. 37; no. 8; pp. 35 - 46
Main Authors: Shah, C., Hyde, D., Qu, H., Levis, P.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2018
Subjects:
Algorithms
CCS Concepts
Computer graphics
Computer simulation
Computing methodologies → Distributed computing methodologies
Computing time
Decision making
Distributed simulation
Distributing
Load balancing
Network switching
Servers
Simulation
ISSN:0167-7055, 1467-8659
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper describes a general algorithm and a system for load balancing sparse fluid simulations. Automatically distributing sparse fluid simulations efficiently is challenging because the computational load varies across the simulation domain and time. A key challenge with load balancing is that optimal decision making requires knowing the fluid distribution across partitions for future time steps, but computing this state for an arbitrary simulation requires running the simulation itself. The key insight of this paper is that it is possible to predict future load by running a speculative low resolution simulation in parallel. We mathematically formulate the problem of load balancing over multiple time steps and present a polynomial time algorithm to compute an approximate solution to it. Our experimental results show that distributing and speculatively load balancing sparse FLIP simulations over 8 nodes speeds them up by 5.3× to 7.9×, and that speculative load balancing generates assignments that perform within 20% of optimal.
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ISSN:0167-7055
1467-8659
DOI:10.1111/cgf.13510