Asynchronous Workload Balancing through Persistent Work-Stealing and Offloading for a Distributed Actor Model Library

Abstract

With dynamic imbalances caused by both software and ever more complex hardware, applications and runtime systems must adapt to dynamic load imbalances. We present a diffusion-based, reactive, fully asynchronous, and decentralized dynamic load balancer for a distributed actor library. With the asynchronous execution model, features such as remote procedure calls, and support for serialization of arbitrary types, UPC++ is especially feasible for the implementation of the actor model. While providing a substantial speedup for small- to medium-sized jobs with both predictable and unpredictable workload imbalances, the scalability of the diffusion-based approaches remains below expectations in most presented test cases.