  We present GLB, a programming model and an associated implementation that can
handle a wide range of irregular paral- lel programming problems running over
large-scale distributed systems. GLB is applicable both to problems that are
easily load-balanced via static scheduling and to problems that are hard to
statically load balance. GLB hides the intricate syn- chronizations (e.g.,
inter-node communication, initialization and startup, load balancing,
termination and result collection) from the users. GLB internally uses a
version of the lifeline graph based work-stealing algorithm proposed by
Saraswat et al. Users of GLB are simply required to write several pieces of
sequential code that comply with the GLB interface. GLB then schedules and
orchestrates the parallel execution of the code correctly and efficiently at
scale. We have applied GLB to two representative benchmarks: Betweenness
Centrality (BC) and Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS). Among them, BC can be
statically load-balanced whereas UTS cannot. In either case, GLB scales well--
achieving nearly linear speedup on different computer architectures (Power,
Blue Gene/Q, and K) -- up to 16K cores.
