Method of up-front load balancing for local memory parallel processors

In a parallel processing computer system with multiple processing units and shared memory, a method is disclosed for uniformly balancing the aggregate computational load in, and utilizing minimal memory by, a network having identical computations to be executed at each connection therein. Read-only and read-write memory are subdivided into a plurality of process sets, which function like artificial processing units. Said plurality of process sets is iteratively merged and reduced to the number of processing units without exceeding the balance load. Said merger is based upon the value of a partition threshold, which is a measure of the memory utilization. The turnaround time and memory savings of the instant method are functions of the number of processing units available and the number of partitions into which the memory is subdivided. Typical results of the preferred embodiment yielded memory savings of from sixty to seventy five percent.