Publications
Load balancing fictions, falsehoods and fallacies
Effective use of a parallel computer requires that a calculation be carefully divided among the processors. This load balancing problem appears in many guises and has been a fervent area of research for the past decade or more. Although great progress has been made, and useful software tools developed, a number of challenges remain. It is the conviction of the author that these challenges will be easier to address if programmers first come to terms with some significant shortcomings in their current perspectives. This paper tries to identify several areas in which the prevailing point of view is either mistaken or insufficient. The goal is to motivate new ideas and directions for this important field.