Evaluation of dynamic scheduling methods in simulations of storm-time ion acceleration

摘要

In this paper we investigate the applicability of classic dynamic loop scheduling methods on a numerical simulation code that calculates the trajectories of charged particles in the earth's magnetosphere. The numerical application under consideration investigates the influence of substorm-induced electric fields that cause magnetospheric disturbances, responsible for severe hazards in human activities and technology infrastructures in the near-earth space environment. The computational time to simulate the motion of each particle is dependent on the inital conditions applied and may greatly vary between different particles. This fact leads to great load imbalances in parallel execution scenarios and thus to degraded overall performance. For this reason we apply dynamic scheduling techniques to load-balance the tasks in homogeneous, heterogeneous and loaded distributed-memory parallel platforms and select the most appropriate among the available strategies. ©2008 IEEE.