Improving the performance of seismic wave simulations with dynamic load balancing

Seismic wave models provide a way to study the consequences of future earthquakes. When modeling a restricted region, these models require a boundary condition to absorb the energy that goes out of the simulated domain. To parallelize these models, the domain is decomposed into a grid of smaller subdomains which are mapped to different tasks. Due to the boundary condition, this division gives rise to load imbalance between the tasks that simulate border regions and those assigned center subdomains. To deal with this imbalance, and therefore improve the simulation's performance, we propose the use of dynamic load balancing. To evaluate our solution, we ported a seismic wave simulator to Adaptive MPI to profit from its load balancing framework. By using dynamic load balancers, we improved the performance of the application by 23.85% when compared to the original MPI implementation. We also show that load balancers are able to adapt to the variation of load imbalance during the application's execution.