Load balancing an application workload among threads is critical to performance. The key objective for load balancing is to minimize idle time on threads. Sharing the workload equally across all threads with minimal work sharing overheads results in fewer cycles wasted with idle threads not advancing the computation, and thereby leads to improved performance. However, achieving perfect load balance is non-trivial, and it depends on the parallelism within the application, workload, the number of threads, load balancing policy, and the threading implementation.

This article is part of the series, “Intel Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications,” which provides guidelines for developing efficient multithreaded applications for Intel® platforms.

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