Techniques are provided for dynamically self-balancing communication and computation. In an embodiment, each partition of application data is stored on a respective computer of a cluster. The application is divided into distributed jobs, each of which corresponds to a partition. Each distributed job is hosted on the computer that hosts the corresponding data partition. Each computer divides its distributed job into computation tasks. Each computer has a pool of threads that execute the computation tasks. During execution, one computer receives a data access request from another computer. The data access request is executed by a thread of the pool. Threads of the pool are bimodal and may be repurposed between communication and computation, depending on workload. Each computer individually detects completion of its computation tasks. Each computer informs a central computer that its distributed job has finished. The central computer detects when all distributed jobs of the application have terminated.