Balancing the Load – A Million Cores in Concert

“If you’re doing any kind of parallel simulation, and you have a bit of imbalance, all the other cores have to wait for the slowest one,” Junghans says, a problem that compounds as the computing system’s size grows. “The bigger you go on scale, the more these tiny imbalances matter.” On a system like LANL’s Trinity supercomputer up to 999,999 cores could idle, waiting on a single one to complete a task.