Équilibrage de charge pour des simulations multi-physiques par partitionnement multi-critères de graphes

Multiphysics simulation couple several computation phases. When they are run in parallel on memory-distributed architectures, minimizing the simulation time requires in most cases to balance the workload across computation units, for each computation phase. Moreover, the data distribution must minimize the induced communication.This problem can be modeled as a multi-criteria graph partitioning problem. We associate with each vertex of the graph a vector of weights, whose components, called “criteria”, model the workload of the vertex for each computation phase. The edges between vertices indicate data dependencies, and can be given a weight representing the communication volume transferred between the two vertices. The goal is to find a partition of the vertices that both balances the weights of each part for each criterion, and minimizes the “edgecut”, that is, the sum of the weights of the edges cut by the partition. The maximum allowed imbalance is provided by the user, and we search for a partition that minimizes the edgecut, among all the partitions whose imbalance for each criterion is smaller than this threshold.This problem being NP-Hard in the general case, this thesis aims at devising and implementing heuristics that allow us to compute efficiently such partitions. Indeed, existing tools often return partitions whose imbalance is higher than the prescribed tolerance.Our study of the solution space, that is, the set of all the partitions respecting the balance constraints, reveals that, in practice, this space is extremely large. Moreover, we prove in the mono-criterion case that a bound on the normalized vertex weights guarantees the existence of a solution, and the connectivity of the solution space. Based on these theoretical results, we propose improvements of the multilevel algorithm. Existing tools implement many variations of this algorithm. By studying their source code, we emphasize these variations and their consequences, in light of our analysis of the solution space.Furthermore, we define and implement two initial partitioning algorithms, focusing on returning a solution. From a potentially imbalanced partition, they successively move vertices from one part to another. The first algorithm performs any move that reduces the imbalance, while the second performs at each step the move reducing the most the imbalance. We present an original data structure that allows us to optimize the choice of the vertex to move, and leads to partitions of imbalance smaller on average than existing methods.We describe the experimentation framework, named Crack, that we implemented in order to compare the various algorithms at stake. This comparison is performed by partitioning a set of instances including an industrial test case, and several fictitious cases. We define a method for generating realistic weight distributions corresponding to “Particles-in-Cells”-like simulations. Our results demonstrate the necessity to coerce the vertex weights during the coarsening phase of the multilevel algorithm. Moreover, we evidence the impact of the vertex ordering, which should depend on the graph topology, on the efficiency of the “Heavy-Edge” matching scheme.The various algorithms that we consider are implemented in an open-source graph partitioning software called Scotch. In our experiments, Scotch and Crack returned a balanced partition for each execution, whereas MeTiS, the current most used partitioning tool, fails regularly. Additionally, the edgecut of the solutions returned by Scotch and Crack is equivalent or better than the edgecut of the solutions returned by MeTiS.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.