How to share work roughly evenly between processes in MPI despite the array_size not being cleanly divisible by the number of processes?

Question

Hi all, I have an array of length N, and I\'d like to divide it as best as possible between \'size\' processors. N/size has a remainder, e.g. 1000 array elements divided b

Answer 1

If I had N tasks (e.g., array elements) and size workers (e.g., MPI ranks), I would go as follows:

int count = N / size;
int remainder = N % size;
int start, stop;

if (rank < remainder) {
    // The first 'remainder' ranks get 'count + 1' tasks each
    start = rank * (count + 1);
    stop = start + count;
} else {
    // The remaining 'size - remainder' ranks get 'count' task each
    start = rank * count + remainder;
    stop = start + (count - 1);
}

for (int i = start; i <= stop; ++i) { a[i] = DO_SOME_WORK(); }

That is how it works:

/*
  # ranks:                    remainder                     size - remainder
            /------------------------------------\ /-----------------------------\
     rank:      0         1             remainder-1                         size-1
           +---------+---------+-......-+---------+-------+-------+-.....-+-------+
    tasks: | count+1 | count+1 | ...... | count+1 | count | count | ..... | count |
           +---------+---------+-......-+---------+-------+-------+-.....-+-------+
                      ^       ^                            ^     ^
                      |       |                            |     |
   task #:  rank * (count+1)  |        rank * count + remainder  |
                              |                                  |
   task #:  rank * (count+1) + count   rank * count + remainder + count - 1

            \------------------------------------/ 
  # tasks:       remainder * count + remainder
*/