Dynamic threshold for imbalance assessment on load balancing for multicore systems

The introduction of multicore microprocessors has enabled smaller organizations to invest in high performance shared memory parallel systems. These systems ship with standard operating systems using preset thresholds for task imbalance assessment to activate load balancing. Unfortunately, this will unnecessarily trigger task migrations when the number of tasks is a few multiples of the number of processing cores. We illustrate this unnecessary task migration behavior through simulation and introduce a dynamic threshold for task imbalance assessment that is dependent on the number of tasks and the number of processing cores. This is as a replacement for the static threshold that is used by standard operating systems. With the dynamic threshold method, we are able to illustrate a performance gain of up to 17% on a synthetic benchmark and up to 25% gain using the Integer Sort Benchmark from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Advanced Supercomputing Parallel Benchmark Suite.